Antinote: Our editorial collective was alerted in late 2023 by an anonymous tipster to the appearance on archive[dot]org of a satirical(?) glimpse into the future. They told us it concerns the neighborhood where we currently reside in south Minneapolis and the twee periodical that circulates here. We aren’t sure we believe the following account of how this artifact was acquired, but as a publication deeply concerned with the spread of propaganda (we hate it except when we do it) we agreed it belongs on our website.
Content warning for highly specific inside jokes. They may relate to contexts beyond the Twin Cities, but we make no promises. A downloadable PDF of this newspaper from the future is available below.
Southside Pride 2074
Minneapolis Community Newspaper Retrieved by Time Traveler!
by an anonymous spelunker
24 December 2023 (original post)
Recently I was exploring the caves along the Mississippi River when I stepped into a strange vortex. The walls and ground swirled for a minute, I felt woozy for a brief moment…and when I looked around, the river outside had turned to rapids, and graffiti I’d never seen before adorned the cave walls. I ventured out of the cave and up to the road—now conspicuously missing any automobiles—and spotted a levitating Southside Pride newsbox. Holy shit! I grabbed a copy and saw the date: January, 2074. Holy shit balls!
Southside Pride is, in my time and apparently for many years to come, a community newspaper in south Minneapolis. It’s often ridiculed for its repeated coverage (by the same few old men) of the same issues: preserving a local eco-disaster golf course, reforming the Minneapolis police (but not so much that actual systemic change would result…that’d be crazy!) and opposing urban sustainability initiatives like rezoning. Their golf course coverage spawned the sensational zine/book/street art campaign “Make The Golf Course a Public Sex Forest.” It’s a wingnut kind of paper, but hey, at least newspapers still exist in 2074!
Realizing my presence could really mess up the timeline I’d somehow spelunked myself into (which, so far, looked alright), I took the paper and retreated to the same cave, where I quickly became lightheaded and had to sit down. Pretty much the entire newspaper was filled with ads for shitty political candidates, contractors, and, as far as I could tell, cheesy holo-romance novels for straight cis people. I removed the section with actual articles in it, and put the rest under my ass to cushion against the cold, damp rock. Just then, the cave wall began to crumble, and the vortex re-activated. Before I knew it, the siq new graffiti was gone along with the sound of the river rapids. But that front page of the January 2074 Southside Pride remained in my hand.
The more I read, the more I realized that while some things may change in south Minneapolis, a lot of things tend to stay exactly the same. Hell, the bylines of the articles must belong to the descendants of the same geezers who write for Southside Pride in my time: Cam Gordon (Jr), Tony Bouza (IV) and (Fr)ed Felien! These 2074 articles tell of a future where, as is all too often the case in Minneapolis, language and form changes but underlying values remain the same. Police have been abolished (in name), but non-governmental “violence interrupters” still serve many of their functions on behalf of the city’s elites. Non-automobile transportation is flourishing, but people still complain about not having a prime parking spot for their car. Homelessness, necessary for upholding any capitalistic society, is still rampant and politicians are still trying to cover it up rather than give everyone homes. As attitudes about public sex have evolved, the Hiawatha Sex Forest has come to fruition (with a fruit forest too)—but some people still yearn for the olde golf course.
I decided that even with a public sex forest, and the MPD gone, the future Minneapolis deserved better than what I was reading. Therefore I am taking the risk of contaminating the timeline by reproducing the newspaper page here as a cautionary tale. Please share and reproduce it as you see fit, to warn others.
Anonymous
December 2023
Addendum:
After searching some terms from the 2074 newspaper page I found, I realized that there were some very similar articles to these ones published recently!
For “Make The Sex Forest a Golf Course”/”Bring Back the Hiawatha 18”
“The Hiawatha Golf Course Master Plan,” Kathryn Kelly, Southside Pride, 1 August 2022
“Changing Lake Hiawatha Into Lake Swampy,” Ed Felien, Southside Pride, 15 February 2016
The “zine excerpt” at the end appears to be a rewriting of portions of the 2021 zine “Make The Golf Course a Public Sex Forest”, which appears in the book Make The Golf Course A Public Sex Forest!, edited by Lyn Corelle and jimmy cooper, Minneapolis: Maitland Systems Engineering, 2023.
For Cam’s Corner/”Are Oviva Holopods The Answer to Homelessness?”
“Is AVIVO The Answer?,” Cam Gordon, Southside Pride, 3 October 2023
For “Bring Back the Minneapolis Police”
“Divide and Collaborate to Solve Third Precinct Puzzle,” Cam Gordon, Star Tribune, 29 October 2023
(The 2074 edition attributes the article to a descendant of kindred police preservationist/reformer, and former police chief, Tony Bouza, who along with his son has been a regular contributor to Southside Pride)
For “Consent of the Governed: Oppose the 2090 Plan”
“Consent of the Governed—Gone!,” Ed Felien, 6 September 2023 (In opposition to the so-called “2040 Plan”)
