In Eastern Europe under the thumb of the Soviet Union, people couldn't publish newspapers or magazines without government approval, which was not forthcoming for anything critical of the ruling regime. People interested in protesting against the regime faced prison time, loss of jobs, assignment to street sweeping and building cleaning crews, among other things. Their children might very well be denied access to educational opportunities. The dramatist Vaclav Havel, for example, when not in prison, was for a time forced to work in a brewery rolling barrels to the room where they would be filled with beer.
Much was done to silence the people living behind the Iron Curtain. Brave and resourceful writers could sometimes smuggle their writing out of the Soviet sphere and into the hands of the BBC, Radio Free Europe, or a major western newspaper. People could speak up and be heard in that roundabout way, but they'd likely be punished for doing so.
At times people were able to borrow keys to an office building and use a duplicating machine. During the Velvet Revolution, some news was distributed outside the capital city via cassette tapes. And famously, people especially hungry to write and publish, to read and think alongside others in their country, resorted to publishing in what was called samizdat.
There were typewriters, there was access to carbon paper, which might produce as many as six copies of a typed document that could be smuggled out into society. If a document was meaningful, a reader might type up six new copies for distribution. It was possible for a new piece of writing to go viral that way, if multiples of six copies could be called viral.
People used the pathways they could find and the publishing tools they could put their hands on.
Question: If conditions grow worse in the United States, what pathways for publishing might remain open? What tools might still be available?
In a nation of 340 million people, what good are six copies–or even six hundred copies–of anything?