Friday Tchotchke #20: Has fandom been gentrified?
Spoiler: I don't think so, really
I would apologize for my irregular Substack schedule, but that would imply there’s something to apologize for. This is my digital fiefdom and I fill it with content at my pleasure! *SLAMS GAVEL*
Anyway, last week I presented at AOIR in Philadelphia which was fun. Alongside my very cool friend Sam Vilkins, who (as we told everyone at the conference) I met on Tumblr in 2010, we presented about the financialization of fandom spaces, and how fans in transformative spaces are increasingly turning to the type of influencer-style self-branding that has previously been common in more non-transformative fandom spaces like cosplay and collecting. We got great feedback from our audience including at least one person whose work we cited directly (SCARY) and I even met some readers of Garbage Day and this very newsletter! I gotta do more stuff like that.
Hopefully I will be able to share our presentation when the conference proceedings come out! Also hopefully next week I’ll have some articles to share? I am doing so much writing every day, I promise. Freelance life is just about going hmmm, I wonder when that piece is going up. Nobody tells me anything ❤️
This week in fandom
This Monday’s issue of Embedded finds Kate Lindsay, by way of complimenting the greatly deserving Brittany Broski (one of the funniest people online), arguing that the “niche, fandom-focused internet spaces” that Broski came up in don’t exist anymore, and that lack will deprive us of talent like hers in the years to come.
I’m trying to figure out if I agree with that or not. I think not? To support her argument Lindsay uses the example of 9-year-old TikTokkers with skincare routines, which doesn’t really ring true as something whose very existence proves the non-existence of weird kids making weird content.
Broski’s weirdness has a massive audience—her unabashed, enthusiastic fangirling of Matty Healy and Harry Styles have won her a loyal fandom of her own, and hopefully inspired many of them to take up the banner. Comments sections across the internet are filled with the mournful lament of people who miss Jenna Marbles’ brand of iconoclastic oddity, which there is clearly still a market for.
If Tumblr suddenly shut down, maybe I’d be more inclined to agree with the idea that the nerds had nowhere to go. But there’s also the fact that even though I don’t use TikTok for fandom stuff, plenty of people do, and there are depths of cringe totally unwitnessed on the app by roving culture writers.
Outcasts may not own the internet anymore, but just by virtue of being outnumbered by loud normies, it’s easy enough even on large algorithmic platforms for real geeks to find and form communities. Life finds a way, &c. Thriving cosplay culture on TikTok has inspired a new generation of fannish costume designers; grassroots fandoms like analog horror grow from the ground up, based around independent lo-fi creations.
As I’ve said before, it’s true that today fandom is something that everyone does, or can do—it’s become normative, in a way it wasn’t even a decade ago. But I think it’s more than a little pessimistic to declare that it’s been “gentrified” just because more people are being exposed to it and even joining in. Insularity is not by definition a good thing; geospatial and political metaphors like “gentrification” only manage to confusingly imply issues of race and class which, although very pertinent to a range of social problems within fandom, have little to do with the issue at hand of appropriation by a faceless, stereotypical mass of influencers and cool kids.
There never really was a time when the internet was “a respite from the social hierarchies and cultural ostracization that can occur IRL,” unfortunately. Basic principles of cultural economy foreclose anything as utopic as that, at least within fandom, where the forces of social capital and fantagonism have the tendency to turn fan communities into horror shows of bullying and discourse with disturbing regularity.
So with that in mind, has anything really and genuinely been lost? Only the primacy of text, I suppose, and there’s not much anyone can do about that other than acknowledge humanity’s Literate Age as a passing 250-year fancy before the inevitable return to mass orality (and in this case visuality).
Whether genuine subcultures can exist at all in an algorithmic world is perhaps a question for someone with more time on their hands than me. But fandom, and more broadly the digital spaces for weird creative people that are being hand-wrung over here, is never any more threatened than the rest of the social web is.