Why We Are Starting This Journal

A journal solves nothing. It can only make a problem sayable, so that more people can go on saying it.

We decided to start this journal because of something small. A friend who delivers food in a county town was downgraded by the platform for "failing the completion rate". He appealed eleven times. Not once did a person answer. What hurt, he said later, was not the lost money. It was that there was no one to argue with.

There is no villain in this story. The people who wrote the rule live in another city and have never seen him. The thing that enforced it is a piece of code that does not read appeals. The support agent works from a script and has no authority to overturn anything. The whole arrangement spreads responsibility so thin that every single point in it is defensible, and a person still ends up pinned.

What we want to do

One thing only: to make such arrangements legible. Which parts they are made of, who decides at each part, and how those decisions come to rest on particular people. This is not exposure. Exposure assumes someone is hiding. Most of the time no one is hiding; no one has simply ever been required to explain.

The journal runs four kinds of writing. Articles are investigation and analysis, and must rest on first-hand material. Reviews deal with books, film and other people’s arguments. Letters matter most to us, and we hope they take more space every year: a journal with writers but no letters is talking to itself. Editorials are the editors speaking, on no one’s behalf but our own, about what we think right now.

Three languages

Simplified Chinese is the source. Traditional Chinese is machine-converted; we know it will be wrong here and there, and that differences in usage are not something conversion can settle. Until someone is willing to do the proofreading over the long run, we would rather ship it with those faults than not ship it at all. English exists only where a person has translated it. Machine-translated political prose reads as though no one is speaking.

That is all for the first issue.