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

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

Yet fans’ role in shaping our present culture, politics, and social life is often overlooked, and the roots of this oversight go back decades.

Publicly, the fangirl wastes money and refuses to make her time useful.

For me, One Direction arrived just in time—like being yanked out of the crosswalk a second before the bus plows through.

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.

not me crying rn

“The story of my life, I give her hope,” he said next. If I focus, I can put myself back in that car and feel the hot rush of gratitude and surprise. I can see my oldest friend’s hand on the dial, turning it up without comment while our waves of nausea passed.

Every generation’s boy band serves a slightly different purpose, but if there is one unifying characteristic I can see, it’s that a boy band opens up space.

She had no real expectation that she would ever interact with any of the band members directly, but she felt a powerful connection to them because they were the same age. “We grew up together in a way,” she told me. “They’re just this amazing part of my history and biography.”

I remember what I wanted more than anything when I was nineteen years old. I wanted something to happen to me that couldn’t be described.

Yet dehydrated in gym shorts and athletic socks, hands-on-knees by the side of the road, he still exudes the elegance of Harry Styles. His cheekbones find the direction of the light, thanks to reflex or a gift from God.

The idea of Harry Styles throwing up on the side of a highway and the idea of a girl I don’t know erecting a shrine to it is the most precise possible representation of what I find interesting.

They made One Direction into the biggest band in the world not simply by loving them, but by sowing chaos on every online platform they touched.

If you’re confused by fan-made supercuts of Korean pop stars, proliferating in the replies to any viral tweet on any subject, you are a local.

“If taylor swift murders me DO NOT PROSECUTE HER!!!”

This is the type of thing that can buoy a person for an hour or so at a time. In the same way that holidays give shape to formless years, album promotion and single releases give color to the days that line up one after another.

The morning after the tenth anniversary, I pulled up Twitter to start work, as usual, and felt the site diminished. Here we were, still grown-ups, still under orders to stay home and scroll. Here we were, nothing to do but our jobs. Nothing to look forward to except the 6:30 glass of wine that marks the end of the workday; nothing to search for except more advice on how to avoid contracting a disease.

Really, Ticketmaster considers a “fan” any person who is not a piece of software.

Everything we need is right in front of us. We should talk about how we went online, driven by some sort of longing, and why we stayed there, pushing that want outward, over and over, until it couldn’t be ignored.