Prologue: Powered by Hacks, Heart, and Mild Hysteria

Prologue: Powered by Hacks, Heart, and Mild Hysteria
by Katherine Autio, Editor-in-Chief, Infocalypse Press

If beginnings are fragile architectures, then this Prologue has been built, fittingly, from the most chaotic of materials.

In the last six weeks, life has come at me like an overclocked probability engine—glitches, hacks, wiped accounts, logins that behaved like haunted mirrors. Maybe it was Mercury in retrograde; maybe it was just the universe shaking me to see what would fall out.

I lost everything digital and rebuilt Infocalypse Press and my entire social media presence (including my OG 2004 Facebook account) from scratch. It felt less like starting anew and more like that moment when you dump everything out of a closet onto the floor because you have to clean it—only to find yourself overwhelmed, startled, and a little awestruck by what was buried in the layers: memories, fragments, forgotten intentions, unfinished ideas, small treasures you didn’t know you’d kept.

This Prologue emerged exactly like that: everything emptied onto the floor of my digital life suddenly revealing the bright, improbable materials I actually had to work with. Through that swirl, ten artists, photographers, writers, and strange-bright makers made this Prologue real. Not the just the theme, nor the scaffolding—but their voices arriving like signals through static, reminding me why this was worth rescuing.

So to each of you who contributed to the Prologue: thank you. You turned a hacked-to-hell six weeks into a beginning that feels luminous. You helped set the tone, sketched the perimeter, taught the architecture what shape it wanted to be. Without you, this would still be a heap of digital debris on my metaphorical bedroom floor.

As we turn toward Issue One—launching January 15, 2026—I’m carrying your energy with me. The recursion has already begun: ideas looping back, unraveling, re-forming, glitching forward.

Now we begin again—
and again—
and again.

See you in Recursion on January 15, 2026.

— Katherine Autio, Editor-in-Chief