Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

if i die tonight tell one direction I’ll see them in hell —LISETTE HERNANDEZ, Twitter, 2014

“Why do I still find this funny even though I’ve seen it millions of times?” The joke is not funny, but it is for insiders, and it has a special bittersweetness to it because the original footage was taken just a few months before One Direction’s final public performance.

The cultural phenomena of fandom and the internet are braided together—one can’t be fully understood without the other.

Yet a fangirl still exists in contradiction to the dominant culture. She’s not considered normal or sane; her refusal to accept things the way they are is one of her defining characteristics.

Eventually, they settled into a rhythm—Tumblr was the confusing and therefore secluded site for longer-form conversations and strategy sessions, while Twitter was the faster-paced site for a public-facing display, where they showed off their numbers and their no-limit capacity for posting.

Then Louis says something incredible, which is that he anticipates someday being forgotten by most of the world, but that he hopes to be remembered, by “a mom telling her daughter” about the band she loved when she was young. “They just had fun, they were just normal guys, but terrible, terrible dancers.” At that, I felt a jolt.

They were driven by passion, but also by a desire for control. Because of their role in promoting and financially supporting the artists they love, these fans have maintained a creator’s hand throughout those artists’ careers, treating them as collaborative projects. They take responsibility for every setback and share in the thrill of every success.

“the louder you screamed, the less likely anyone would forget the power of fans,”

“Being a fan is very much associated with feminine excess, with working-class people, people of color, people whose emotions are seen as being out of control,”

Women were seen to have the minds of children.”

The 1950s and 1960s saw more and more products marketed explicitly to teenagers, often reinforcing the idea that they were a distinct group of people with a separate identity from their parents, and with the rise of teen-marketed products came teen-oriented TV shows during which they could be advertised.

So long as teens existed as a lucrative market category, the industry would supply them with a “teeny-bopper” idol. When these idols were written about by journalists and critics, it was often with full acquiescence to their marketing, tinged with disdain.

They’ve also edited them and recirculated them and used them as the inspiration for a range of creative works so enormous—and largely uncatalogued—that it can’t even be grasped.

To him, the culture industry— a term he coined so that he would not have to use the term “mass culture,” which implied too much agency on the part of said masses—was the exact opposite of possibility. It secured the status quo. It offered only a brief respite from work, providing the worker with energy to work more. It offered the “pretense” of individual identity and choice, but was really a force for making everyone agree that they thought and felt the same.

which love would be imagined only as it is described in the pop songs, happiness would be the car that the pop song advertised, and songs would eventually serve only as billboards for themselves and their industry.

the most surrealist of them seem to be written by people who are reaching to find something that has not already been proposed, or people who just have uncontrollable imaginations, or people who are making fun of the form.

The joke is that we have talked so much about these people that we no longer have anything left to say that isn’t totally absurd.

Fans became, almost as a rule, the first to adopt new platforms and to invent new features of the internet—a habit molded by the fact that they were the people with the most obvious incentive to do so.

Tumblr was a creative new space that had little in common with other social media sites on which users were expected to maintain public profiles, and on which the ties between people or “accounts” were also public and could be explored in order to understand a web of connections.

Something like bad1dimagines is still reliant on Tumblr in a lot of ways, but it is not reliant on any formal archival system, and it is designed to “safeguard” a still-evolving cultural text, for as long as anyone is still on the site and reblogging its posts to make more and more copies.

It connects those who remember and those who are learning, allowing them to bond over the mutual project of digging up the good stuff.

To him, the new web would be about “harnessing collective intelligence” through activities like hyperlinking, tagging, and user-generated content. Where software companies used to talk about silent customers, they should now talk about users as “co-developers” of their projects.

If there’s one thing that Stan Twitter is known for above all else, it’s that when it turns against you, it turns bitterly.

Fans are unavoidably part of Twitter’s knotty history with abuse and coordinated harm.

When I was nineteen, I heard a One Direction song for the first time, and it ruined my life. This is how girls on the internet usually put it, and I like the way it sounds.

The fully commercialized internet is built on an understanding of identity in which each of our characteristics is one that advertisers would be incentivized to track.

One Direction fans, telling their origin stories, typically start somewhere else: a YouTube video, which led to a rabbit hole full of more clips or a Tumblr dashboard mysteriously filling up with GIFs of boys they didn’t recognize, which were so fun to watch that they could only dream of understanding their context.

He also pointed out that the practices we associate with fandom—collecting, cheering, following, fixating, celebrating, memorizing—were the habits of many people before anyone would have been called a “fan.”

The word “fan” is now synonymous with consumer loyalty; you could be forgiven for considering it a marketing word.

She’s also aware that some people are jealous of her ability to talk so openly about something she really cares about.

the classic ’90s duo Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. But even then, most fans agreed that real person fiction was acceptable only if writers never “broke the fourth wall” by alerting the subjects of the stories to their existence.

A conversation that was native to the internet and seemed to have some kind of internal logic when discussed on Tumblr was then presented in a format in which it made no sense.

discussion. Over the last ten years, they’ve developed a common set of characteristics: The “victims” of the conspiracy tend to be famous men; the villains tend to be women.

Richard tweeted apologetically that this was not what was happening. He kept joking about Larry throughout the summer, even tweeting at Mike Pence to ask if he thought Larry was real. But around that time, other One Direction fans started writing to him on Twitter to explain the full drama of the conspiracy theory. “I was like, Oh, well, this has gotten darker, or maybe it was always darker than I thought,” he said. “Basically, I disavowed the whole thing and was like, I really thought this was a joke. I didn’t know how serious it was.” The Larries turned on him immediately, calling him manipulative and a liar and a shill and homophobic, even though Lawson himself is gay.

“The homophobic and sexist stereotypes I was arguing against were the same ones I was perpetuating,”

phase that a person eventually grows out of. When the goal is to use a fandom’s numbers and organizational capabilities to lift a political cause, the external result is also a clarification, one more like an adjustment of a lens that brings something into clearer view: selecting a pop star to love was never a political tactic, but an expression of optimism that anyone can be changed.

these men are more a reflection of us than we are of them.

These years were the first in which teenagers were considered a significant demographic independent of their parents, and the media began to fret over their behavior.

Today, the internet is home to fandom of bedroom culture itself. The girl stars of Instagram and YouTube and TikTok let others into their private spaces to watch them create that culture, and they’re followed by mini stan armies of their own.

In group chats, various pop music fandoms organized to keep the internet’s focus on Black Lives Matter by canceling all fandom-related hashtags. They repurposed news accounts with large followings that usually track chart positions or celebrity Instagram activity to instead disseminate information about the protests—reading material, bail fund links, shareable graphics.

That the broader internet noticed what they were doing was not unusual—it was only unusual that they liked it.

It is inappropriate now to make fun of girls for screaming or boy bands for existing or anybody for liking anything—this is what we asked for, but it doesn’t feel like enough.