#adjusted margin

But there is no reason to believe that xerography will entirely vanish. It will persist as a signifier of a specific style, attitude, and politics that changed how we lived, created, connected, and organized ourselves in public spaces in the late twentieth century. And if xerography mattered because it was a medium through which we imagined how to create new types of publics, counterpublics, cities, and communities, perhaps it is entirely appropriate that its legacy will never take the form of a set of artifacts confined to a glass vitrine in a museum.

Copy machines, in this sense, not only helped to forge social bonds but also arguably changed who could be an active participant in the making of culture. After all, as long as the city was a bulletin board and the bulletin board was everywhere, in a sense we were all living in our communication platform. We walked through it, were influenced by its aesthetic, and of course, as my own archival research for this chapter reminded me, we took it mostly for granted too—that is, until downtowns regained their status as sites of economic interest and the aesthetics and content of xeroxed posters began to come under attack.