Success Quote by Rudy Rucker

A shrug disguised as a rallying cry: if the gatekeepers won’t open the door, build your own cheap, loud side entrance. Rudy Rucker’s line lands because it treats “failure” not as an endpoint but as a cue to change distribution channels. It’s the voice of someone who’s lived through multiple media regimes - photocopied punk-era zines, early web weirdness, today’s platform chokepoints - and still believes in the scrappy persistence of small-circulation culture.

The subtext is impatience with prestige economies. “All else fails” implies you tried the respectable routes: academic journals, mainstream publishers, glossy magazines, conferences, institutional legitimacy. Zines sit at the opposite pole: informal, fast, low-budget, often anonymous, aesthetically rough. That roughness is the point. A zine doesn’t need permission; it needs paper, bandwidth, and nerve. Rucker, a scientist tied to speculative fiction and cyberculture, is gesturing at an older hacker ethic: publish anyway. Iterate in public. Let the community find you.

There’s also a quiet jab at the myth that the internet solved access. “Print or web zines” doubles as a reminder that digital spaces can be just as exclusionary - dominated by algorithms, monetization, and attention scarcity. Zines remain a loophole: they’re not optimized for scale, which is why they’re still useful when scale is the trap.

It’s practical advice, but it reads as cultural strategy: keep making work, keep circulating it, and when institutions mistake your weirdness for a flaw, treat that as market research.