Processed World Issue #7, Special Sex Issue! Spring 1983.

Offset-printed zine Approx. 4,000 copies Issue 7 of Processed World subtitled the Special Sex Issue , channels the collective's signature blend of critical essay, satire, fiction, and graphic art toward a single sustained argument: that sexuality, like labor, is a site of power, alienation, and capitalist recuperation. The issue reportedly nearly sold out within a few months of release, a measure of both its controversy and the breadth of its readership beyond the magazine's core San Francisco audience. The lead essay, Stephen Marks's "Sex Roles/Social Control," examines how sexual insecurity reinforces workplace hierarchy, arguing that the emergence of the gay male clerical worker and the female manager has in practice legitimized rather than challenged patriarchal office culture. The most distinctive contribution is Linda Thomas's first-person "Toiling Tails: It's a Business Doing Pleasure With You," in which Thomas draws an explicit parallel between her eight and a half years as a nude model, sex worker, and stripper and her subsequent experience in San Francisco's office world ,concluding that both forms of labor robbed her of the same things by different means. Linda Wiens. Launched in San Francisco in 1981, by Chris Carisson, Caitlin Manning and Adam Cornford, Processed World was a radical magazine created by office workers who turned their frustration with the rise of automation into sharp critique and biting satire. Mixing labor activism, cultural commentary, and subversive humor, the publication exposed the dehumanizing effects of computerization, surveillance, and temporary office work—what its founders called the absurdities of "wage slavery." The publication operated as a non-hierarchical collective, with design and layout evolving collaboratively over time. Visual identity and graphic experimentation were shaped by rotating designers and artists, including Pauline Paranoia and Bonita Thoreson, alongside numerous cartoonists and illustrators drawn from underground comics and activist art scenes. This collective production model was central to Processed World’s political ethos and distinctive visual style. Over 32 print issues (1981–1994), plus later digital editions, Processed World chronicled the lives of clerks, temps, data-entry workers, and programmers navigating an increasingly mechanized workplace. Its “byte-back” ethos included playful sabotage and underground distribution, positioning the zine within broader anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian movements. Now recognized as a seminal document of late-20th-century labor resistance, Processed World captured the voices of the overlooked workforce at the dawn of the computer age—workers who fought back with wit, rebellion, and radical imagination.…