Paulina Borsook and Brian Maggi: In Formation Magazine

Plutopia News Network

On this Plutopia News Network episode, hosts talk with In Formation magazine’s humor editor Brian Maggi and writer/contributing editor Paulina Borsook about their newly released Issue #3 — an intentionally high-quality, print-first, “anti-Wired” cult mag skewering tech culture with smart, insider humor. They trace the evolution from early-2000s issues to today’s broader “tech bro” mainstream, celebrate the tactile joy and permanence of a beautifully produced physical magazine, and describe their editorial approach: entertaining, evergreen pieces (from smartphones and surveillance to agile/Scrum and absurd job titles), dense visual jokes, and “inside baseball” references that reward readers who get them. They riff on the HAL-like AI cover and fair-use parody, discuss distribution (online, Europe via MagCulture, U.S. retail coming via Barnes & Noble), and gripe that Google search oddly buries their site. The business model is essentially philanthropic, with mostly fake ads by design; the goal is cultural critique, not clickbait. The conversation widens to iPhone’s societal impact, AI’s authorship and environmental concerns, and why sharp humor — made by people who’ve been inside the industry — is a necessary antidote to today’s hype.

Brian Maggi:

It’s funny how much more mainstream the term “tech bro” is today. As a joke even. Paulina and I did this piece in the last issue, in the second issue — was it the second or the first, Paulina?

Paulina Borsook:

Second, and that was “Silicon Valley Alpha Males.”

Brian:

Yeah.

Paulina:

Yeah. And, you know, the tech bro one is clearly a descendant of that. And you and I were vastly amused by what we did with the Alpha Males one, but it was very inside Silicon Valley. You know, you can go back and read it, and it’s held up pretty well, but it’s like you have to have been there at the time to understand why it was perfect in its small way. Whereas the tech bro thing has become “so everyone knows about them and everyone talks about them” and yeah. I don’t know what else to say about that.

Buy In Formation at https://informationmagazine.com/product/in-formation-magazine-issue-3/. In Europe: https://magculture.com/products/in-formation-3

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