It’s with a strange mix of joy and sorrow that I announce the end of Anarcho-Geek Review.

Writing for this site got me through one of the darkest periods in my life. When anxiety had me too crippled to do anything but work, sleep, and consume media, it gave me an outlet. I could barely get out of bed, but I could rant about the video games I was playing, the books I was reading, and the movies I was watching. Amazing contributors came out of the woodwork, and Sadie the Goat let me talk her into becoming my co-editor.

But I never put in the work it would have taken to make AGR as amazing as it could have been. I wanted, most of all, to pay our contributors (and potentially pay our editors eventually). I wanted to do that because I believe that we need, as anti-capitalists, to learn to value otherwise un-valued labor. Certainly including writers. That would have taken a lot more work at promotion and fundraising, which none of us had the energy for.

For a long time, we let AGR coast along, with a few articles every few months. I was planning on doing that indefinitely, but… every unresolved project adds to a person’s cumulative stress. It stressed me out that AGR hadn’t posted anything in months. It stressed me out that I haven’t written enough for it, or solicited enough from others, or kept up with editing other people’s work. So after consulting with Sadie the Goat, we’ve agreed to shut down.

The site will remain up as an archive. Maybe one day it will be reborn. But part of anarchism, for me, is the idea that institutions and organizations ought not be continued for their own sake, but only for the sake of what they do. That is to say, it’s better to let stagnant projects die so that new projects can be born.

For myself, I’ll continue to write essays over at my own blog Birds Before the Storm and for other publications, as well as my increased focus on short fiction, books, and music. I can’t speak for Sadie the Goat, but I hope she’ll continue to write everywhere she’s able, and if I’m lucky maybe she’ll guest post on my blog or expand out to a wider audience — I consider her one of the best writers in anarchism today, and I’m honored to have had the chance to work with her.

Thank you all, it’s been fun.