Un-Access Atlanta

north america / mexico | culture | opinion / analysis Wednesday June 11, 2008 08:28 by Cullen Brown - Capital Terminus Collective

How a humble, irregular, two-page anarchist newsletter ran the Atlanta Journal Constitution's own Access Atlanta out of business. A purely fictional and speculative article not based on facts, but for humor purposes only.

In 2005 if you were to walk down a sidewalk in downtown Atlanta or one of the “hip” neighborhoods like Little Five Points or East Atlanta, one would be met with row after row of stand alone newspaper stands. If one would have any interest at scanning the titles, one would most likely see the following: Atlanta Journal Constitution, USA Today, Creative Loafing, Auto Trader, RENT, etc. But one publication in particular may draw attention to a particular population: the anarchists.

Access Atlanta was a small newspaper that was published by the Atlanta Journal Constitution as a guide to the “trendy” happenings and venues in Atlanta, much like the already solidly established Creative Loafing. One thing in particular that was interesting about the cover (as that was all most readers ever looked at anyway) of this newspaper was a large circle-A, the infamous symbol of the anarchist movement. It was for this reason, that the Capital Terminus Collective chose the name “Anarchist Atlanta” for their newsletter.

As a logo and layout, the CTC could not use the circle-A, in order to avoid any legal trouble that may ensue among the obvious spoof-name of the newsletter. Anarchist Atlanta grew to a whopping 200 issues published each month, while Access Atlanta’s publication and distribution remained the same. Statistics were weighed strongly in favor of Access Atlanta, but this did not discourage CTC at all from its goal of spreading anarchist thought among the city, so in order to create an elusive image, their regularity of publishing Anarchist Atlanta became a bit… Well… irregular.

This the new irregularity-tactic™ applied by the CTC quickly paid off and this is how: While the number of CTC’s newsletter being published rarely strayed far from 200 issues each time a new issue came out (in fact some issues doubled in publication numbers), Access Atlanta slowly faded out of existence. It does not need to be pointed out how these two events have anything to do with each other specifically, just that they happened together, and therefore, Access Atlanta’s disappearance can be contributed to the fact that Anarchist Atlanta did much better on the market, and much like a Starbucks may run a local, independent coffee shop out of business everyday, Anarchist Atlanta has successfully competed with Access Atlanta and survival of the fittest remains the law of the land.

It is because of the recent discovery that the market has favored our newsletter that the Capital Terminus Collective has changed the name of our newsletter from Anarchist Atlanta to just: Capital Terminus. It just goes-to- show-ya™, that in this incredibly efficient and fair free market we have in this country, a free publication will always win over one the consumer must pay for.

R.I.P. Anarchist Atlanta

Excerpted from Issue #8 of The Capital Terminus, Anarchist theory, news, and analysis, June 2008.