kludge.run

dispatches from the margins

We have print on demand at home

2026-07-08

I was born in the auspicious year of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This means that I’m old enough to have remembered both a time (as a youth) before the Internet and a time (as an adult) before the ubiquity of the Internet. As a youth, the Internet was a novelty full of information, weird fan sites, and porn. For years, this remained more or less true, but with more harmless cat memes as time went on. I wish it would have remained so.

But we wanted to make it easier. We wanted the rest of humanity to “get with the program”. Then came the Platforms. MySpace is who I will credit with starting the Platforms. The term Platform has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, but here I use it to denote websites for which you (the human) produce Content in some form or another, but own nothing. An example is Facebook. A counterexample is a personal blog. We now live in the Age of Platforms. The Platforms were great because you didn’t have to set up your own servers and they’re free! They had a vested interest in repaving the internet to make it as easy to use as possible! How could that ever go wrong?

It is 2025 as I write this (note: document languished for a year, updated to be published). The tech industry has become an increasingly dominant force in politics and governance and has proven their willingness to exercise this force, even to malevolent ends. The executives from these companies have bought and consolidated virtually all of the traditional news outlets. Private equity controls the rest.

Free speech is still free and will continue to be, at least until you try to actually use it. That’s starting to get a little weird. The few major US organizations that still attempt to report anything critical of the US regime are met with retaliation and scrutiny from the government in the form of subponeas, threats against licenses, and other forms of overt intimidation.

The downside to getting everybody doing something is that by the time you’re done, everybody is doing it. I think that “making the Internet easy” was a fundamental mistake. I’m not saying there should be an IQ test or anything before you’re allowed to use the Internet, but just that it’s too easy. There’s no friction.

The theoretical reach of a social media account is not commensurate with its effort of use. The triviality of generating lifelike video with AI is not commensurate with its capability to cause harm.

I believe that with a lack of effort comes a lack of gravitas associated with the act. This breeds contemptuousness, which then trivializes saying something awful you vindictively type out that you otherwise wouldn’t dream of saying in person with your grandmother present.

That in turn desensitizes us to the very act of saying something awful. It affects you in the the implications of things you read on the internet too, like the collective shrug that time when the richest man in the world’s built-for-revenge-porn AI started calling itself MechaHitler. Or the obvious fatigue we suffer throughout the casual and constant atrocities being committed by the people that the same man propelled into power. We aren’t immune to the things we consume online.

We aren’t immune to the things we consume online.

Put more bluntly, talentless hacks didn’t have the ability to output misinformation and hateful garbage when they didn’t have a worldwide, locked-in audience coupled and a lobotomized plagiarism machine to do the heavy lifting.

The Internet should have been a tool to better humanity and instead we’ve turned it into a weapon and gave it to the worst people.

Yet, as the Internet comes to devour the last few corners of our lives that it once struggled to touch, its ubiquity kind of borders on the edge of becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Facebook is handling the downturn in user engagement by replacing it with AI zombies. Journalism is dissolving into unresearched and incomplete articles on a constant delivery cycle (also thanks to AI). Blatant ad pieces masquerading as interesting content have now become desperate and stark. The owners of social media sites are suppressing speech and cooperating with the US government surveillance apparatus.

I think that as this signal to noise ratio continues to degrade, we’ll see less interest in using the Internet of Platforms. Or at least less value in them. I think they’re just going to keep turning into the same rent-seeking cesspool that is cable tv, and you can see how popular that is these days.

I propose that we let the computers talk to themselves on the Internet, and we get back to basics. Disseminate content physically in book form! Bring back the zine!

Unfortunately, printing is hard if you’re trying to do anything more complicated than a simple single sided stack of papers with a staple through the corner. Most newer printers have functions which allow them to print in more complex patterns, including those required to correctly fold into a booklet.

I made a tool to help with this. It’s called imposify. There weren’t a lot of options to do this a few years ago. I made a pass at the tool and it kinda worked. My friend helped. I got a feature request, which is something. But it was sloppy and didn’t work sometimes. It lacked features.

I finally gave it a year’s worth of updates that finished today. It’s a pretty functional tool at this point as far as I can tell, if not a little basic. In all this time I think other tools have cropped up that have become more fully featured, but I think I’m happy enough with it.

I might talk about that more at some other point. Lets talk about book imposition.

A booklet doesn’t have single pages on each sheet inside. A typical booklet has four pages on each sheet, two on the front and two on the back. They are staggered back and forth in a way that when you print them out on front and back on sheets of paper, you can fold them in half and staple through them to form a booklet. This requires reshuffling the pages of your document though. Think about it:

A normal PDF document has one page per sheet and orders the pages in numerical order:

    1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

But to impose those pages, you would need to shrink them in half, rotate them, and then stagger them two to a page, starting with the outer pages and working inward:

    8/1, 2/7, 6/3, 4/5

Some printers can be configured to do that for you, but the process varies from printer to printer. If your PDF is already set up this way then you can just print with duplex.

Unsurprisingly, lots of Content from the internet translates well enough into print. Here’s some ideas of things you could do:

The primary reasons you would want to create physical content: