Science & Tech Quote by Richard Kern

Nostalgia hits here with the bluntness of a bank statement. Kern isn’t mourning “print” in the abstract; he’s tallying the loss of a very specific ecosystem where magazines didn’t just distribute images, they financed a lifestyle. The quote reads like a collapsed business model narrated as autobiography: a monthly pilgrimage to LA, a concentrated week of work, then a long exhale of freedom back in New York. That rhythm is the real subject. It’s the old creative economy’s promise that short bursts of commercial labor could subsidize artistic drift, downtime, and choice.

The intent is half grievance, half clarification of cause-and-effect. “All because of the internet” isn’t a nuanced media critique; it’s a line drawn between two eras, before and after attention became cheap. Kern’s subtext is about bargaining power. In the magazine world, a photographer could be scarce: a name, an eye, a gatekept access point. Online, images are abundant, circulation is frictionless, and publishers can pay less because someone else will take the job for exposure or speed. “Point mags” going under signals not just closures but the disappearance of mid-tier outlets that once paid reliably without requiring celebrity-scale reach.

There’s also a quiet admission of what those gigs bought: autonomy. “Do whatever I wanted” lands as both brag and epitaph for a kind of bohemian capitalism where risk was underwritten by glossy ad pages. Kern is documenting the cultural shift from patronage-by-publication to hustle-by-platform, where freedom still exists, but it’s rarely prepaid.