About eight years ago, I set out to write a book about how the Internet was changing the television industry. One of the areas that I found most fascinating was the rise of online fandom for TV series on platforms like Tumblr and Twitter, which seemed, especially the early ones, much more intense than the ones that had emerged on Facebook.
And by "intense," I mean obsessive.
They often focused on shows and stars that were somewhat obscure. Either they had never had such a large audience, or they had been off the air for several years.
This, I came to learn, was to be expected.
if you were a fan of The sopranos or Brad Pitt, you were competing with millions of other fans. But pick a darker show and you'll be competing, at best, with hundreds of other fans.
Even stranger was that these fans were rarely the fourteen-year-old girls I initially assumed they were, but rather middle-aged women. Often with husbands and children of their own.
The other thing I learned was that in these uber-fandoms (of which there were many) it was not allowed to offer even the slightest criticism of the show or the actors.
Unless, of course, the fandom has collectively decided that a certain storyline, actor, or producer was "evil," in which case you'd be expected to badmouth them.
And by "expected", I mean "required".
Because if there was one thing all fans online had in common, it was this rigid application of groupthink.
This all came to me out of the blue last month when I was listening to a podcast where New York Times film critic AO Scott discussed why he was leaving the film review business.
And one of his reasons was that the rabid fan of All Those Superhero Movies did not allow any kind of criticism, however slight. Scott had to be 100 percent on every aspect of the film or face a relentless torrent of criticism online.
This was very much in line with behavior she had witnessed from fans on TV, where a casual comment about them not really liking the star's new haircut would unleash a torrent of abuse.
There's another place where we see this kind of relentless groupthink, too: politics.
Political thought used to be more nuanced. People can support a party or candidate in some of their ideas, but not in all.
More than that, there was no expectation that this would be the case.
Groupthink, after all, was for totalitarian states. The Soviets were not allowed to criticize Stalin. The Chinese had to be completely devoted to Mao.
People in liberal democracies could think for themselves and have a variety of opinions.
Until suddenly they were gone.
It was the internet that did it. Twitter in particular.
But suddenly, anyone who had an idea outside of the Accepted Party Doctrine was a traitor.
Rightists who deviated from groupthink were considered "RINO", leftists were considered members of some kind of hate group, and in both cases they were essentially held up against the wall and shot.
"Canceled" is, I think, the correct term.
The parallels with online fandom don't end there either.
There was the creation of "fan art", which is just what it sounds like, works of art created by fans that serve to celebrate and glorify the stars of their favorite shows. Said artwork is of varying quality, from drawings that look like they were done by a talented fourth grader to those that look like they were professionally produced. But think of all the fan art featuring politicians we've seen over the last half decade.
There were the self-proclaimed Interpreters, the ones who would take a random statement and imbue it with far greater meaning than the speaker had ever intended. So a celebrity mentioning in an interview that they liked to listen to jazz to relax (something which, actually, they may have done a grand total of once) would cause a frenzy among the fandom to educate themselves on jazz and find the most relaxing . tracks, with further discussion of which tracks his crush was probably listening to.
Again, think of all the times Twitter has taken a political figure's off-the-cuff comment and turned it into doctrine.
There was also the belief that a betrayal perceived from within the house was much worse than that of a stranger. So the fan who didn't like the star's new haircut, the pundit who questioned a policy proposal, was to be treated much harsher than an outsider.
The political parallels are evident here, too: the notion that the worst betrayals come from within the party goes back to Trotsky, a concept George Orwell used to great effect in Farm.
This then leads to the next inevitable question: how closely related are these two scenarios? Did the rise of Standom and its acceptance online lead to further stagification of politics? Or did the structure of Twitter, which is decidedly not a place for nuance, make both outcomes inevitable?
I'm going to go with Option C: a little of each.
The rise of social media allowed for the growth of online fans, especially around celebrities and C-level shows. This was aided and abetted by the growth of streaming television, which made all those old shows accessible to everyone. a new generation of fans, allowing fandoms to constantly replenish themselves. Because sometimes all it takes is two or three really dedicated fans to keep an entire FanForum site running.
And in order to maintain control of the world they had so valiantly created and defended, the OG Stans had to enforce the rules in the new ones, chief among them being "everything our heroes do is good." Everything about the show is great."
A philosophy that easily translated into politics.
Where the shows were replaced by political movements and the stars by standard-bearers. With online communities where North Korean levels of loyalty were required.
So how do we get out from under this?
We wait.
Because even without Elon Musk's intervention, Twitter was not going to exist forever. Eventually, the world would transition to the New New Thing, one where extravagance wouldn't pay off so quickly.
Politicians would also change, becoming less like cult leaders and more like normal people doing a job.
Together, they are likely to spark a new acceptance of nuance, a less all-or-nothing allegiance to ideas and celebrities.
Is the time.
