One afternoon, at my desk in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan, bored out of my mind, I watched the Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg give a speech at Georgetown University—the subject of which was his choice not to fact-check political ads—and was startled by the comments streaming down the side of the livestream. “You’re looking very handsome and dashing … Looking very sweet and cute … Lots of love for you.” It ended with a fire emoji and a peace sign. “This man left an indelible footprint in the sands of time. Thanks a lot for this wonderful platform called FACEBOOK.” When I messaged some of the commenters, they talked to me about loving him, calling him a “great hero” and complimenting him on being very young.1
There is no such thing as fan internet, because fan internet is the internet. We don’t see these things happening until they’ve happened: Now every time a pop star or a real housewife or a woman politician makes a quip, it winds up the subject of homemade merch and reaction GIFs. 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. When a girl does something interesting on TikTok—a dance, a funny face, a well-executed bit about how golf courses are causing the destruction of the planet—dozens of Instagram accounts dedicated to her pop up overnight. We love to fan so much, we’ll take nobodies and make them into stars, just because they filmed themselves skateboarding, drinking cranberry juice, and listening to Fleetwood Mac, or simply because they yodeled for a few minutes in a Walmart. We trot out a new icon every week, adulating them until they do something worthy of a fall, or until we forget. We stan everything now, from Supreme Court justices to new flavors of sparkling water. I have recently stanned a local news blog, a stranger in the comments of a YouTube video, my own sister, a friend’s puppy, and a bottle of skin-contact wine.
Fanning is the dominant mode of online speech, and the vitriol of defensive fans is the dominant mode of shouting people down on social platforms. When anybody, anywhere, says something critical about Taylor Swift, they know what kind of week they’re in for. When a famous person’s name is trending on Twitter, it hardly ever means they’re dead—it usually means that some sizable group of online people has turned on them, called for their cancellation, and announced a so-and-so-is-over party. When President Trump announced that he and his wife had tested positive for the coronavirus, the replies to his tweet filled up with the same nonsensical fake hexes, translated from English into Punjabi or Amharic, that Swift fans had been using in the months prior to harass music journalists.2
Fandom is the dominant mode of commerce—the backbone of the influencer economy, the force behind the bizarre rise of self-aware Brand Twitter and the dizzying ascent of a handful of pop stars whose personal fortunes are larger than the yearly budgets for some small cities. Brand loyalty has been rebranded as fandom, as has passive consumption of all sorts of media, from HGTV to Spotify playlists. The word “audience” slips seamlessly between concert halls and follower counts. The word “love” drifts around like a leaf.
The subcultural theorists of the 1970s and ’80s understood “youth culture” as a matter of class. They were interested in the skinheads, rockers, “mods,” and “teddy boys” of postwar England, subcultures that mostly centered on new genres of music and a masculine working-class identity.3
These subcultures were newly visible because of the rise of mass communication (i.e., television) and mass culture. They were fashion based, and emerged at the beginning of the era of mass consumption. Scholars were concerned about superficial displays of commonality and solidarity replacing legitimate class-based political action, even as they were curious about the way that new subcultural identities could help a person shape a view of the trajectory of their life, “plans, projects, things to do to fill out time, exploits,” and so on. 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. Though theorists found the rockers and the skinheads fascinating, they, too, worried: “There is no ‘subcultural’ solution to working-class youth unemployment, educational disadvantage … dead-end jobs … low pay and the loss of skills.” It was all, when it boiled down to it, a waste of time and energy.4
These were also viewed almost exclusively as subcultures for young men. Girl culture, or “bedroom culture,” was not discussed until 1976, when Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber wrote a now famous criticism of subcultural studies as a field: “The absence of girls from the whole of the literature in this area is quite striking, and demands explanation.”5 It was either that girls hovered on the edge of male subcultures, or that they weren’t interviewed by male researchers, or that they weren’t there at all. And if they weren’t there, where were they? McRobbie and Garber looked at the home and found that girls were doing entirely their own thing within the constraints that had been placed on them. “They may be marginal to the subcultures, not simply because girls are pushed by the dominance of males to the margin of each social activity, but because they are centrally into a different, necessarily subordinate set or range of activities,” the pair wrote.6
The idea of bedroom culture is that subcultural activities can happen anywhere, and that they often happen in private. “One of the most significant forms of an alternative ‘sub-culture’ among girls is the culture of the Teeny Bopper,” McRobbie and Garber wrote, though it was difficult to study because the girls they tried to interview often made fun of them or refused to provide useful answers to their questions. Fandom could “easily be accommodated” in the home, and had a low barrier to entry—anybody with a bedroom, a record player, access to magazines and to a social circle of similarly interested girls could participate. It was low-risk, and though it was set up around highly manufactured pop acts and commercial products, it was low supervision and therefore freeing. The theorists called it “a meaningful reaction against the selective and authoritarian structures which control the girls’ lives at school.” Bedroom culture was subversive, and required avoiding surveillance by parents, boys, or unfriendly peers.7
This is not to say that they found it empowering, exactly. McRobbie and Garber referred to fandom as a “passive” subculture and believed the “personal and autonomous area” available to preteen and teenage girls was more like a consolation prize, “offered only on the understanding … [of] a future general subordination.”8 But they revised that stance in a 1991 update to the essay, recharacterizing girls’ at-home fandom practices as more “resistant” and more interesting than they’d previously recognized.9 Today there is a whole body of scholarship on bedroom culture. Thirty years after the original essay was published, Mary Celeste Kearney reviewed its legacy and then filled in its largest gap, declaring girls’ bedrooms “sites of cultural production,” not just consumption. Historically, she argued, researchers had been focused on consumerism, and had “[ignored] subjects’ remarks about playing guitars or writing poetry.”10 By the time of her writing, girls were not only in their bedrooms looking at magazines and listening to records—they were also using the internet. At least 20 percent of American children had internet access in their bedrooms, she wrote in 2007, and girls were surpassing boys in online activity. They were using it to email and instant message, but they were also using it to blog and design websites, and eventually to broadcast themselves. Far from petering out, as the well-examined subcultures of the 1970s did, bedroom culture lasted and grew and changed with the times.
Girls were “problematizing the conventional construction of the bedroom as private,” Kearney wrote, “by using this space not only as a production studio, but also a distribution center.”11 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. The latest innovation of bedroom culture is to be fourteen, sitting in your room, making an Instagram account dedicated to cataloguing the clothes that another girl wore while she was dancing on TikTok, also in her room. The whole web is created in a girl’s image now. What all of this means is still fuzzy—modern mannerisms and language and platforms of communication are styled to make more sense for fan culture and girl culture than for almost anything else, but does that effort translate into power for anyone in particular?
During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, fans of BTS and other K-pop groups achieved national attention for their efforts to aid the protestors from their position of power, which was Twitter.
After the Dallas Police Department tweeted asking people to submit videos of “illegal activity” at protests to its iWatch Dallas app, K-pop fans organized on Twitter to flood it instead with fancams—quickly edited greatest hits of favorite performers dancing and preening, pieced together using basic software.12 The app crashed within hours, and though it’s never been confirmed as fact that the fancams caused this, the Dallas Police Department has yet to offer any other explanation. Soon after, the FBI tweeted asking for images of “individuals inciting violence” at protests, and K-pop fans were called into action again.
That wasn’t the limit of their efforts. 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. They realized that the platforms they had created to celebrate and amplify their favorite artists could be at any moment used for other things. The spontaneous uprising was covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and major TV broadcast networks and observed with bemused excitement by much of Twitter. People who had never taken any interest in K-pop fandom before started suggesting that K-pop fans be trusted to run the U.S. government, and complimented them for doing more tangible work than elected members of Congress.13 That the broader internet noticed what they were doing was not unusual—it was only unusual that they liked it. “Locals and kpop stans are known for not getting along very well,” one BTS fan who participated in the effort told me at the time. “The fact that some people were praising us for the effort or even joining in was crazy to me.”14
In general, K-pop fandoms’ default status is “being noticed,” to the irritation of many, and it is difficult at this point to look anywhere on social media without seeing their handiwork. A common tactic for promoting a new K-pop group is just wandering around comment sections and replies to viral tweets, dropping names: when BTS was first rising to popularity, its fandom—called ARMY—started commenting “any ARMYs here?” under seemingly random YouTube videos. Loona, a new girl group that debuted in 2018, was promoted similarly but with even more dedication, as the phrase “stan loona” took over Twitter. Fans—known as “Orbits”—replied to any viral tweet with the phrase and still do. (When President Trump contracted the coronavirus, he was of course informed that he should have stanned Loona.) As I’m writing, the phrase “stan loona” is tweeted about once every fifteen seconds.
The problem with all this is that “K-pop fandom” is a loose term that applies to millions of people. Everyone seems to know that there are a lot of K-pop fans, but that knowledge has not led to the reasonable conclusion that many types of people—with different political ideologies and different motivations for stirring things up—must therefore be K-pop fans. Soon after the Black Lives Matter protests, I spoke to the fandom researcher Lori Morimoto, whose work has been primarily on transcultural fandom—how border-crossing fandoms interact with the disparate gender, sexual, and political contexts of different countries—as well as fandom cross-fertilization that happens online. She laughed when she talked about the way K-pop fans had been recently framed as Gen Z heroes, saving the world from cops and Trump. The way that the media describes fans “tends to go from one extreme to the other,” she said. “It’s either hormonal oversexed teenagers to the polar opposite, Oh, they’re politically savvy! They’re activists! That doesn’t capture the culture or the fandom any more than the derisive or derogatory take.” Though, of course, many K-pop fans were participating sincerely in the Black Lives Matter movement, Morimoto felt it was somewhat overlooked that this was “an event that made particularly good use of skills that they happened to have, because they’re cultivated within that fandom.” It didn’t mean that K-pop fans were suddenly the most politically active people in the world; it meant that K-pop fans were the best in the world at flooding social media with easily repeated messages. “There’s nothing intrinsic about K-pop fandom that makes it somehow more socially aware,” she said. “It had everything to do with the material contexts of how that fandom plays out.”15
And though the tools K-pop fans have at their disposal are powerful, they’re also limited. They can post, and they can boost posts. The fandom’s skill set mostly allows it to amplify ideas, not to stifle them. Soon after the protests started, the stans took to hunting down racist hashtags, such as #WhiteLivesMatter or #AllLivesMatter, and filling them up with fancams as well, with the intention of derailing conversation for those who were attempting to use them sincerely. “All that does is make it trend,” Zina, a writer who runs the blog Stitch’s Media Mix, told me afterward, expressing frustration. “The hashtag is the message. You flood a hashtag, you make a hashtag trend, you terrorize your fellow fans. I couldn’t stand seeing White Lives Matter trending in K-pop in the U.S.”16
In the K-pop forum on Reddit in the summer of 2020, fans and observers discussed the effort to take down police apps with fancam videos and the fact that trolls on 4chan were planning a counterattack with “gore” clips (a term for shocking, usually violent videos that can be spammed at online enemies). They brushed off the threat.
If K-pop fans and 4chan trolls were going to be the new dueling forces of the internet, K-pop would win because it would have at least tacit support from the commercial platforms. “Twitter already favors the K-pop stans,” one wrote. “Trust me, in the list of user abuses of the system, K-pop stans rank pretty high. Twitter loves them because they get to call it engagement.”17 This was followed by a short debate comparing 4chan and K-pop fans, solely on the metrics of who was more “numerous” and who more “zealous.” The verdict: definitely K-pop fans on both counts, though “channers” do know more about how to use bots.
As I watched the fandom protest actions that summer, I felt a little like something had been let out of the box. Fans were having an important realization about themselves, and it wasn’t clear what they would do with the information. Miranda Ruth Larsen, a K-pop researcher based at the University of Tokyo, told MIT Technology Review that, while the police-spamming actions were positive, she was concerned about online manipulation “being held up as the representative of what it means to like K-pop.”18 Meanwhile, several news outlets dubbed K-pop fans “the new Anonymous,” referring to the diffuse, politically active, and culturally bizarre hacking collective that took shape on 4chan and related spaces in the early aughts, rising to the level of publicly pranking entities like PayPal, the Church of Scientology, and various local governments around the time of Occupy Wall Street. After a spate of arrests in the early 2010s, Anonymous had mostly disappeared. What was left of it had splintered over competing interests in activism and in straight-up trolling, as well as disagreements over the appropriateness of certain tactics and the demands of big egos. Amid the online hacktivist actions that sprang up to aid the 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, Anonymous had seemed to come back. The group reappeared after George Floyd was killed, threatening to leak confidential information from the Minneapolis Police Department. Journalists speculated that they could have been responsible for several related pranks—hijacking Chicago police scanners to play “Fuck tha Police” and “Chocolate Rain,” taking down the Minneapolis Police Department’s website with a DDoS attack—but some reporters were skeptical. It was unclear whether Anonymous was “back” with a meaningful reconstitution of its old participants or whether the spirit of Anonymous was being invoked by disparate copycats who were brought together by different shared affinities.
The borders of the group were blurry. In the first place, Anonymous was meant to be a movement that anybody could join. (In a 2014 New Yorker profile of the movement, the computer security researcher Mikko Hypponen said it was “not a group,” but a “series of relationships.”)19 So when K-pop stans found themselves operating in a similar space, whatever had returned of Anonymous, or whoever was taking up the mantle of Anonymous, welcomed them. “Anonymous stans ALL KPop allies!” the account @YourAnonNews posted after the Dallas police app went down.20 Soon after, The Independent reported that some K-pop stan accounts were changing their profile names and photos and posting instead as members of Anonymous.21
Which group was really in control, or whether they were distinct groups at all, became harder to determine. “Anonymous is now weaponizing stan energy,” one person wrote in the K-pop subreddit. But others disagreed, pointing out that some Anons sincerely considered themselves ARMY as well. “If you think about it, this is the only logical outcome, lmao,” one person commented. I have to agree—this does seem like the most logical outcome of the last ten years of the internet. “If we don’t understand K-pop fans, then we have a more difficult time understanding when fandom or fan culture start to permeate other aspects of our political cultures,” Lori Morimoto told me. “If K-pop fans are activists, then it becomes more difficult to explain how Gamergate or doxing is related to fandom, but they are actually on a continuum. They’re not unrelated things.” The original Anonymous crumbled in part because its participants couldn’t decide what tactics and traditions were appropriate to use. Maybe fans understand the power of social media better than everyone else does, or maybe it’s exactly the opposite. They certainly don’t consider themselves a malevolent force—and they usually aren’t—but haven’t they employed the same tactics as those online groups who do?
One Direction made me care about the internet. Time will tell if this was a blessing or the worst thing that ever happened to me. I’m still inspired by the political power fans seem to have created from thin air and are now prepared to use, and I’m still nervous about the fact that it has been so underexamined. There have been so many calls for empathy, inspection, and nuanced understanding on behalf of the angry men the internet has raised, but there have been far fewer for the fangirls whose beliefs are far more convoluted. They’ve been dismissed and despised, and now they’re exalted, but they have yet to be taken seriously. Real scrutiny would reveal everything that the internet has made possible: unimpeded creativity, remarkable feats of will, the unexpected easing of loneliness, the goofy precursors to solidarity, but also devastating atomization and division, overstimulation realized as constant anxiety, emotion mutilated into absurdities, attention rendered an addiction, passion funneled into targeted harassment.
Fans have started using their networked power for good, bad, amoral, indecipherable reasons—the political climate of the last decade has tempted them to play with their power in new ways. As they get better at wielding it, it’s anyone’s guess what they might use it for. “2020 will be the year Twitter stans will be liked by people,” one person wrote in the K-pop subreddit during a summer of protest.22 Another corrected them politely. It would be more than that. It would be the year stan Twitter would be seen for what it was: “a source of unlimited chaotic energy.”