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

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

One pair of hands looked just like every other, outstretched in the dark, lining the bottom of other people’s camera frames. We knew that our lives would not be fantasies, except for the fact that they were right now.

(One post, seared into my brain, is a collection of images plotting “the outfit you wear to jump in front of niall’s car.” It includes a blue gown covered in Swarovski crystals and a microwavable Kid Cuisine meal with Shrek-branded packaging.)

Cue Lana del Rey's "This is What Makes Us Girls"

college, I also remember a GIF set of Harry Styles, answering an interview question about the shrine to his own vomit, nodding diplomatically and saying, first in one frame, “It’s interesting. For sure,” and in a second, “A little niche, maybe.”

In August 1998, David Bowie announced that he would be launching the “first artist-created Internet Service Provider.” BowieNet, as it was called, was a fully functioning ISP for eight years. Fans paid $19.95 a month for a “davidbowie.com” email address,

“I’m a thirty-three-year-old woman, I just don’t give a fuck anymore,” she told me. “I know there are things I like. I want to talk about them and go have a good time. I’m a millennial and I’m going to die.”

sweet Irish golf jock standing up for his tragic American fan base, doomed to live here all of the time.

When a man is seen doing something endearing—eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos with chopsticks, leading the country of Canada with some amount of competence—he becomes “the internet’s boyfriend” for a season.