I’m looking for the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit. I know it was on Tumblr—I remember seeing it there. In the fall of 2014, at the beginning of my last year of 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.”1
Those are my memories. These are the facts. That October, Harry Styles went to a party at the British pop singer Lily Allen’s house in Los Angeles.2 The next morning, riding in a chauffeured Audi, in his gym clothes, on the way back from “a very long hike,” he requested that the driver pull over. On the side of the 101 freeway just outside Calabasas, he threw up near a metal barrier, looked up, and locked eyes with a camera. He is sweaty, peaked; his hair is dirty, pulled up in a messy bun. 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 day they were taken, the photos circulated in tabloids and on Tumblr and Twitter, and a few hours later, a Los Angeles–based eighteen-year-old named Gabrielle Kopera set out to find the spot and label it for posterity. She drove there alone, then taped a piece of poster board to the barrier: HARRY STYLES THREW-UP HERE 10-12-14, she wrote in big block letters. The grainy photo she posted first to her own Instagram circulated later on Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and all those junky-looking celebrity blogs that are actually just search engine scams. Even more than the photos of Harry Styles, I remember that I loved the photo of this sign. Harry Styles threw up here! That’s all he did—but given that we’ve seen him throw up only once before (gross story), and we’ve never seen him do it on this strip of gravel, the sign suggested that the event was worth recording for posterity. Harry Styles threw up here! Six months prior, the Los Angeles Times reported that the then twenty-year-old Styles had dropped $4 million on a five-bedroom house in Beverly Hills (a photo gallery of the home’s interior was removed from the story shortly after publishing).3 Yet he descended from the Hills, jumped out of the car in fancy suburbia, and threw up in the street. Why stop at a piece of poster board? Why not a plaque?
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. Imagining what could make me feel most myself, I thought it would be standing on that ground. No, I would not touch it—I would just look at it, photograph it, and delight in executing the dramatic act of Photoshopping myself into a meme in the physical world. So, in December 2019, I flew to Los Angeles for two days and drove around in a rented minivan, stopping only at places where I knew Harry Styles had been.
I had no other curiosities about the city in which I had spent fewer than forty-eight hours in my entire life. My first move upon arriving was to hop confidently onto the wrong shuttle bus, then walk two miles in the sun to pick up my rental car. I wanted to take photos of the Christmas decorations in the Budget office—piles of tinsel and glimmering metallic mini trees made every surface look like an imminent fire hazard and the set of a music video. But I was too embarrassed to take out my phone, so I just absorbed what I could, accepted my keys, and headed for a donut shop. Harry Styles wore a crewneck sweatshirt with the donut shop’s logo on it while out for a jog in the summer of 2016, according to a Styles-specific fashion blog that blocked me on Twitter sometime after. I spent my time waiting in line in the parking lot of Randy’s Donuts deliberating over what sort of donut Harry would be most likely to eat. I didn’t think it would be anything too elaborate—something classic, not too rich to sit well with black coffee. (For a while, Harry Styles had a habit of drinking black coffee with a spoonful of butter and a spoonful of coconut oil in it, part of one of those terrifying new diets for men.) I settled on a classic glazed donut and a jelly-filled one, because this was vacation. Then I drove around Los Angeles with gobs of strawberry dripping down my arm, memorizing the words to the new Harry Styles album, singing with my mouth full and the windows down. I spent the whole trip chasing him around the city in a dogged pursuit that I certainly felt was nearly cinematic. There were costume changes! Mishaps! A long montage of scribbling in a notebook in public! I put on my nicest New Year’s Eve dress to go to the Nice Guy on La Cienega Boulevard, a restaurant to which both Harry Styles and Zayn Malik have taken dates, and where cameras are forbidden, and I also paid $15 to park my car above a gentlemen’s club. My reservation was so early that there was nobody else in the entire restaurant. I stayed for ten minutes, drinking one $18 glass of wine, then swiped a handful of souvenir matchbooks and went back to the hotel.
The next morning, wearing a baseball cap low over my face as if I were myself a celebrity, I went to the Beachwood Cafe on the edge of Griffith Park. I was afraid that the workers might see something in my eyes or the tilt of my phone camera that would indicate I was there only because Harry Styles had referenced the place in a new song—a ballad about his ex-girlfriend Camille Rowe, with whom he apparently used to eat brunch there. The lyric goes, “The coffee’s out / At the Beachwood Cafe / And it kills me ’cause I know we’ve / Run out of things we can say.” Sad! The coffee was not out, for the record, just a little watery. I tucked the receipt into my wallet, in the spot where some people might carry their business cards or photos of their children. I sat and drank the coffee and snuck photos of my surroundings, thinking not about the possibility of breathing in a speck of dust made from Harry Styles’s dead skin, but of how many girls just like me would do this very thing. I was early; the album had come out only the night before. But now, if I click through the tagged photos for the Beachwood Cafe on Instagram, I see them. One after the other—hundreds. “The coffee actually WAS out” on one afternoon, around 1:00 p.m. Pacific time, though it “WAS NOT out” just two hours before, when a different Styles fan got there. Many of the pictures tagged with Beachwood Cafe are not actually of the Beachwood Cafe, but just of girls in their rooms, wherever they may be, listening to the same song. On Tumblr, there are mood boards for an afternoon at the Beachwood Cafe with Harry Styles, and blogs with URLs like out-of-coffee-beachwood-cafe.tumblr.com, and, of course, speculation about whether Styles has ever been to the Beachwood Cafe with Louis Tomlinson, to whom many still believe he is secretly married. I came back an hour later and ate pancakes—why not! This time I snuck photos of the royal-blue-and-yellow-triangle-checkered flooring, as well as my dirty plate.
And of course, I drove thirty miles from my hotel, taking the interstate to the 101 freeway and following it through Calabasas, toggling between watching where I was going, sipping hot coffee—black!—and scanning the shoulder for a familiar patch of gravel. I’d billed this trip as a pilgrimage, and I felt a feverish dedication to securing a moment of spiritual bliss. Without Harry Styles, Los Angeles to me was just an American city like any other I had seen mostly on TV. A freeway was just a freeway. A shoulder of the road was something I would never risk life and limb to stare at while steering a borrowed vehicle with one hand. I drove ten miles one way and then ten miles back down the other side. In the original photo, you can’t see anything except the edge of a guardrail, some pebbles, and the direction of traffic, which was toward the camera. I’m not sure why I thought the exact spot it was taken would be so obvious—I guess I grossly overestimated my ability to differentiate one piece of roadside from any other—but I convinced myself I’d gotten close enough. The sound of crunching gravel was familiar and significant; the air was heavy, not with humidity but with history. Here we were! This contact, while glancing and totally imaginary, was more intimate than the time I’d spent in stadiums and arenas with Harry Styles, and funnier to me than life itself.
It’s one of these patches of dirt here, I imagined telling a double-decker tour bus. It’s very important to remember. Then I imagined a Los Angeles ghost tour one hundred years in the future: This is where that journalist was decapitated by a tractor trailer as she knelt at the side of the road looking for the spot where a pop star threw up. She hovers over the 101 to this day, searching, but not unhappily. See, there she is now, she’s eating a donut. I got everything I wanted, really, because what I wanted was an opportunity to make my own digital shrine—just some photos of the highway, just some tweets about how good it felt to go in search of it. Just a little joke about how I’m getting older, and how I’m allowed to rent a car. Just something to report back to the girls on the internet.
The earliest experiments in online community had an odd gravitational pull, for whatever reason, for Grateful Dead fans. Community Memory, the first digital bulletin board, was installed in a Berkeley record store in 1973 and was tightly intertwined with the California counterculture—it was dedicated to the sharing of art and literature, and full of Deadheads.4 The same year, the Stanford University artificial intelligence researcher Paul Martin created the distribute command “dead.dis@sail” to collate his lab’s email conversation about the Grateful Dead into a proto listserv. In early 1975, he made the mailing list semipublic by putting it on ARPANET—the U.S. Department of Defense’s experiment in communication protocols that would eventually lead to the invention of the internet as we know it—and researchers from other universities started joining.5 Martin programmed automatic news updates that crawled for information about the Grateful Dead and sent them out immediately to all subscribers, and they, in turn, crowdsourced information from other fans in a manner and with a purpose strikingly similar to those of pop stans today. In 1975, for example, based on group intel, several members of the dead.dis@sail mailing list crashed a wedding at a country club outside Palo Alto after learning that the Dead guitarist Bob Weir had been hired to play with his side band Kingfish.6 (They were allowed to stay.)
According to the internet researcher and historian Nancy K. Baym, “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of dial-up computer bulletin board systems were launched throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and many were specifically set aside as forums for Grateful Dead fans.7 Here, early adopters innovated the idea that the internet might be organized by affinity. Though early internet fandom was invite-only and near exclusive to well-paid white men, it was also the first evidence of a pattern. Fans became, almost as a rule, the first to adopt new platforms and to invent new features of the internet—a habit molded by the fact that they were the people with the most obvious incentive to do so.
The WELL, the most influential early virtual community—the story of which is chronicled in Howard Rheingold’s 1993 history The Virtual Community—was founded by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985 as a general interest dial-up bulletin board system for the Bay Area in California. (Later, in the early 1990s, it morphed into a broad-use internet service provider.) Though many of the other early users of the WELL were technologists, scientists, journalists, and academics to whom computers were already familiar, Deadheads invested hours of free time to learn about the technology that would make it possible to practice their fandom together in cyberspace.8 Their “conference” on the WELL was known only as “GD,” and it was always busy with chatty fans—dissecting lyrics, discussing concerts, sometimes swapping memorabilia or tapes. It could be joined only by emailing an administrator or “host” personally, and was founded by the Deadhead historian David Gans, with the help of the tech journalist Mary Eisenhart and the programmer Bennett Falk, who came up with the idea at a Grateful Dead concert. In The Virtual Community, Matthew McClure, the WELL’s first director, identifies two major growth spurts for the board: the first was word of mouth among Bay Area computer professionals and journalists; the second was the Deadheads. “Suddenly, we had an onslaught of new users,” he tells Rheingold. “The Deadheads came online and seemed to know instinctively how to use the system to create a community around themselves.”9 At the time, individual internet users had to pay à la carte for the hours they spent online, and being a member of the WELL—if you used it fanatically—could run up a bill of hundreds of dollars a month. These funds were necessary to keep the service operational, and the Deadheads were therefore crucial to its survival. According to Rheingold, the Grateful Dead conference on the WELL was “so phenomenally successful that for the first several years, Deadheads were by far the single largest source of income for the enterprise.”10
By the 1990s, people building alternate lives through online fandom were also imagining the future of the internet. Fan sites with rudimentary features like guestbooks and photo collections were some of the most heavily trafficked pages on the internet once the World Wide Web opened up to a broad recreational-users base, and in 1995, Yahoo’s free web hosting service, GeoCities, took off, filling up with thousands of fan sites that had something for everyone. The full range of these pages is difficult to see today, but amateur archivists have put substantial effort into preserving it: you can still browse partially salvaged pages for The X-Files (with names like “24 Hour News X” and “The Hall of X”), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (“Buffyology—The Academic Study of Buffy”), Sailor Moon (“The Moon Palace Archive”), the boy band Hanson (“Grown Up Hanson Fans Unite”), Harry Potter (“Perfect?,” a Percy Weasley fanfiction archive), Sherlock Holmes (“The Sexiest Lines in Sherlockian Canon”), CSI (“Naked Truth,” a site dedicated to an imagined relationship between investigators Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle), Britney Spears (“Jen’s Britney Spears Page,” “Jerry’s Britney Spears Page,” “Matt’s Britney Spears Page,” “Britney People,” “Britney Space”), and almost any other media property or personality you can think of.11 Backstreet.net, “the MOST famous/best BSB page on the Net,” was created in 1997, and though its guestbook is now littered with phone-sex spam, it is still browsable. A faux-LED “I <3 BSB!” GIF still spins around on the front page, above links to 25,000 photos, 12 discussion boards, and an RSS news bulletin that sent out 1,691 updates about the Backstreet Boys before it ceased publication in 2012.
These pages were social networks in their own right, bound by limitations that meant conversation could happen only clunkily in guestbooks or by linking and cross-posting, but richly interconnected nonetheless. Some of the more elaborate sites had discussion boards; Murmurs, an R.E.M. fan site built using Microsoft’s FrontPage HTML editor by then sixteen-year-old Ethan Kaplan, debuted in 1996 and had ten thousand users and five thousand new posts per day during its peak. When Kaplan shut the site down after eighteen years, he reflected on it as “a great example of an emergent community around fanaticism.”12 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, Bowie chat rooms, exclusive Bowie content (including concert “cybercasts”), 5 MB of storage space on their Bowie fan pages, and “full uncensored” internet access. “I wanted to create an environment where not just my fans, but all music lovers could be a part of the same community,” Bowie said in a press release, “a single place where the vast archives of music information could be accessed, views stated and ideas exchanged.”13
The idea of mailing a monthly wireless bill to Taylor Swift or sending your professional correspondence from an “@justinbieber.com” email address would be ridiculous now, but that kind of participation was, for a time, a logical way for music fans to experiment with the possibilities of the internet. Before most people were using the internet for anything, fans were using it for everything. Still, for much of the 1990s, these fans were mostly men—well-educated, affluent, and white. The World Wide Web was born in 1994, and though millions of people came online throughout the mid-1990s, the gender gap in the United States didn’t close until 2000. (In a study of women’s internet adoption from 1997 to 2001, the economists Hiroshi Ono and Madeline Zavodny argued that the delay could be attributed to men and women’s differences “on average, in socioeconomic status, which influences computer and internet access and use.”)14
To see the women of the early internet, and of early online fandom, you have to look for them. Women were expressly unwelcome on the web in its early days. “There are no girls on the internet,” a catchphrase that originated in Usenet gaming communities in the early 1990s, was in wide use on 4chan and Reddit and other forums well into the aughts. It was codified in “The Rules of the Internet,” a digital document that has fluctuated in length and form as it’s been passed around message boards for the past fifteen years but still contains several phrases that are instantly recognizable to anybody who has spent time online.15 (Rule 34—“if it exists, there is porn of it”— is so well known that it’s regularly quoted by people who probably can’t name the source or a single other “rule.” Same for Rule 32, “pics or it didn’t happen.”) Rule 30 is “there are no girls on the internet,” and it’s followed by a correlated rule, number 31, “tits or GTFO,” a common refrain from the days in which any internet user claiming to be a woman was demanded to prove it with a photo of her body.
Before TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, and all the other Web 2.0 platforms that incentivized the hoarding of attention and the cultivation of a personal brand, pseudonymity was the online norm. Though the lack of real names or bodies made it a difficult task, men in these spaces were still fixated on identifying the sex of the users they interacted with—and driving women off the web by insisting they weren’t there to begin with. “The discourse of male-by-default is pervasive across pseudonymous spaces,” the internet researcher Siân Brooke observed in a retrospective.16 But there were, of course, girls on the internet; they were just hidden. Nancy Kaplan and Eva Farrell’s 1994 ethnography of “young women on the net” staged a direct challenge to earlier studies that had dwelled on the negative experiences of adult women who’d tried to participate in internet culture, and instead emphasized the importance of speaking to teenage girls. Teen girls, Kaplan and Farrell pointed out, had no professional reason to be online, and so it was only their “desires” that brought them there. This made them an ideal subject for study of what anyone might be seeking on the internet, and whether they were finding it. “We have been so busy noticing what hinders and repels us that we have failed to ask what draws some of us,” Kaplan and Farrell wrote, introducing a deep dive into the public messages on a handful of popular online bulletin boards—all owned and operated and populated predominantly by men, and all used, also, by teenage girls. These girls were going to boards for thoughtful, long-form correspondence that differed from the conversations men were having in both style and intent. Girls were writing “to maintain connection rather than to convey information,” Kaplan and Farrell observed. Their sketch was self-admittedly simplistic, using anecdotal accounts to point at behavioral stereotypes, but it was pivotal in demonstrating the reality that girls, in fact, had not been uniformly dissuaded from computers or from life online. Farrell watched the conversations of others and kept her own diaries. “I noticed that even as I was inducted into this world, I invoked changes in it,” she wrote. “You create the net in the act of accessing it.”17
In the late 1990s, women contributed disproportionately to the boom of fan websites—a boom that was energized by the creation of thousands of GeoCities pages in honor of boy bands like NSYNC, Boyz II Men, and the Backstreet Boys in the United States, as well as Take That, Westlife, and Boyzone in Europe, all of which grew in parallel to the wealth of pages created by the enormous, women-led fandoms for TV shows like The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Girls and women are a substantial presence on the World Wide Web,” the researcher Pamela Takayoshi wrote in 1999, bucking the general assumption—it was just that the sites they were building occupied “a nonmainstream, nondefault position” and were going unnoticed.18 Even as men continued to argue that women did not exist online, women were outpacing them: most new users of the internet in 2000 were young women, according to a Pew Research Center study conducted at the time, and most of them were young women who were “more enthusiastic” about the internet than their male counterparts. The report referred to these energetic new users as “Instant Acolytes” and credited them with a projected societal shift of enormous consequence:
With Instant Acolytes’ inclination to go online from home and for fun, the Internet may be evolving much like the telephone into a domestic tool for sociability used more heavily by women. Rather than a mysterious technology that is the province of men, the Internet is on the cusp of becoming a household appliance whose applications are as much social as transactions-oriented.19
By the time of Pew’s follow-up study in 2005, 86 percent of American women between eighteen and twenty-nine were online, compared with 80 percent of men that age.20 Men were still using the internet for a wider variety of activities, but women were far more prolific online communicators, sending and receiving emails for personal reasons that had nothing to do with work and approaching the new tools at their disposal as ones well suited for connection. Though men had been the early adopters of the internet, women were the early adopters of social media—in late 2010, just after the launch of Instagram, 68 percent of American women were using some combination of social networking sites, compared with 53 percent of men. By August 2012, the numbers had risen to 75 percent for women and 63 percent for men, and the gap didn’t close until 2015.21 Incidentally, One Direction had been the biggest band in the world for four years by then, and I was twenty-two years old, having the time of my life, friendless in my first apartment in New York City, scrolling through Tumblr.
The reason I was so disturbed when I was inclined to look for the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit on Tumblr and couldn’t find it is because I rely on Tumblr to provide me with my memory.
Tumblr had no system in place to archive or analyze activity on its platform before it hired its first “meme librarian,” Amanda Brennan, in 2013, six years after the site launched.22 But luckily Tumblr’s basic premise—as a somewhat secretive space for identity exploration through multimedia—enabled a culture with a unique visual style and a predilection for “discourse” and historicizing. Stockpiling images and compiling them into “master posts,” the basic work of archiving a cultural phenomenon, became one of the common recreational uses of the site—today, even for those wading past broken links and stabbing blindly for useful search terms, there are remarkable libraries of One Direction ephemera to be found. They’re made up of GIF sets, an invention of Tumblr users, and organized with elaborate tagging systems that are possible only on Tumblr, where users can put spaces between words and write entire paragraphs legibly in a post’s tags. Though they can be difficult to find, posts that are deleted are not necessarily gone, because reblogging a post and adding to it makes a persistent copy of it—totally unlike a Twitter retweet, which disappears if the source material is erased. At various points, users couldn’t reply to posts at all without reblogging them onto their own page, turning every conversation into a public exquisite corpse.
The way Tumblr is built also explains why so many describe the site as formative in their political, aesthetic, and cultural taste, as well as their personal identity. Alexander Cho, an assistant professor of Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara who researches how young people use social media, has credited the physical structure of Tumblr with the creation of its culture. In his 2015 doctoral thesis, he explored the reasons that queer young people of color gravitated toward Tumblr in its first several years of popularity, and how the site was used “to cultivate an explicitly anti-heteronormative, anti-white supremacist politics.”23 Tumblr was a creative new space that had little in common with other social media sites on which users were expected to maintain public profiles, and on which the ties between people or “accounts” were also public and could be explored in order to understand a web of connections. While Tumblr content can be seen and distributed widely, and there are certain Tumblr posts from many years ago that persist, reblogged by hundreds of thousands of people, it’s rare for a Tumblr post to become well known outside of the insular world of the platform. When a blog disappears or its URL changes, there is no easy way to find it again. Tumblr’s search feature is so bad it might as well not even exist. These design choices meant that Tumblr was impossible to simply drop in on and understand: “Tumblr, especially in the early days, seemed impenetrable, ruled by a code and norms that were never outlined anywhere officially, only intuited,” Cho writes. “[It] feels almost as if it purposely gave the middle finger to established conventions of indexing, search, and persistence on the internet.”24
The same design elements and features that foster Tumblr’s singular culture make it difficult to find cultural artifacts on the site. But this, too, is part of Tumblr’s culture: for me, the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit is preserved by my resolve to wade through shards of information and broken links to find it. I should have prepared better—I should have reblogged the shrine years ago so that it would forever be part of my own page and I would never have to worry. Because Tumblr’s primary interactive feature is the reblog, its primary mode of engagement is frantic stockpiling. Scrolling through the feed, users gather things to their pages—things that may be deleted later by their original creator but which anyone, after reposting, can single-handedly preserve.
The small thrill of understanding a meme comes from a feeling of belonging, but when years have gone by and the meme resurfaces, the feeling is also one of relief. For Christmas one year, my sister made me a sweatshirt with a Tumblr in-joke on it: a photo of Niall Horan trying out for The X Factor with a paper sign taped to his shirt, on which some production assistant had typed out his name, erroneously, as “Naill.” Dredging up his tiny humiliation is funny because it’s a callback to a time before the world knew his name, when only day-one fans could be expected to notice the error. Bringing it up again years later is a way of teasing him, even though he’s not there to participate, and it’s a way of teasing each other for caring so much about his life. It’s also an offer of reassurance—we all feel this way, still, a decade later.
These are the best and most satisfying memes: the ones that require years of recall. I can scroll through my Tumblr feed today and sometimes be startled anew by the absurdity of “Wax Liam,” the nickname the One Direction fandom gave to Liam Payne’s horrifying wax figure at Madame Tussauds, which looks, frankly, like some kind of sex doll. The mouth is open, corners turned up, with a tongue visibly close to emerging—kind of like he’s panting? But the eyes are dull and dead, with no smile creases. The effect is that the face looks pained and horny. It’s been Photoshopped into any number of unnatural scenarios, including a tattoo on Zayn Malik’s arm; an Insidious movie poster, overtop the faces; the “hide your kids” meme; a still from the music video for Christina Perri’s “Jar of Hearts” (?); and a whole bunch of smutty tousled-sheet fanfiction scenarios. (In the fall of 2020, going about my workday scrolling, I felt a tinge of sadness upon seeing the news: One Direction’s wax figures were being removed from the museum after seven years.) Yet Wax Liam is not easy to find if you are not already embedded in Wax Liam culture. It was never added to a formal archive or written about in a publication that would maintain such a thing. Know Your Meme, the de facto encyclopedia of internet culture for more than a decade now, does not reference it. There are only eight entries on the site that refer to One Direction at all. The meme repository of record is run by well-intentioned and detail-obsessed people, but everyone has blind spots. “Having a female voice on staff is very rare,” Brennan told me when I was reporting on the site’s ten-year anniversary.25 (Before she was Tumblr’s meme librarian, she interned at Know Your Meme for a summer.) Your best bet for links to Wax Liam, and details about his storied time on earth, come from messaging the operator of that invaluable blog bad1dimagines. “I like this blog a lot because sometimes when people ask about a specific thing (a picture or wax liam), you link it,” an anonymous follower wrote to her once. “Every time I click a link I get this mini rush, because I never know where it will send me or what I’ll be looking at. It’s always more disturbing than what I could have imagined.” (bad1dimagines replied with a smiley face shedding a tear.)26
When I wrote to the proprietor of bad1dimagines, she told me that she hadn’t imagined her blog as an archive when she started, but considers that word “an accurate description of what it’s become.”27 The blog started as a joke—of course!—but then people started to rely on it, so she started to take it seriously. And by creating archives outside of the purview of institutions or corporations, and in massive collaborative efforts with no barrier to entry or rules for participation, an amateur archive like bad1dimagines is, as Abigail De Kosnik argues in her 2016 book Rogue Archives, doing the work of democratizing cultural memory. “Traditional memory institutions were not designed to safeguard cultural texts that proliferate indefinitely” she writes.28 Something like bad1dimagines is still reliant on Tumblr in a lot of ways, but it is not reliant on any formal archival system, and it is designed to “safeguard” a still-evolving cultural text, for as long as anyone is still on the site and reblogging its posts to make more and more copies. It can respond immediately to inquiry, replace links when they break, and fill in missing pieces of information before it becomes too eroded to be read by future audiences. It connects those who remember and those who are learning, allowing them to bond over the mutual project of digging up the good stuff.
Fans are engaged in archival work all the time because they’re always engaged in a conversation of “remember when,” presenting and building on their own oral history. (Where collective memory “used to mean the record of cultural production, memory is now the basis of a great deal of cultural production,” De Kosnik writes.)29 In the early days of One Direction, when several members of the band had girlfriends and Niall didn’t, a random photo of him holding a leaf became another in-joke: it was passed around with a caption about “shipping” the pair known as “Neaf.” In 2019, Horan posted a photo of himself standing next to a plant in his house, and “Neaf lives, never give up the ship” popped up on my dashboard. The first “Neaf” is the sort of event that would be compiled in a master post of stupid things Niall has done, or “best memories from early One Direction.” (Today, you can easily find it, of course, on bad1dimagines.)30 These archivists acknowledge their own limitations and unreliable memory, often admitting, “I can’t find this,” and then asking others, “But didn’t this happen?” Sometimes, the best anyone can do outside of locating the original post is connecting with someone else who remembers the original post, and who may be willing to describe it for the record.
In my deluded attempt to locate the precise former roadside site of a large piece of paper, I failed. But in talking about it online, I succeeded in archiving the story once more. When you search for the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit, you will see a handful of stupid tweets by me. These tweets may fall, like so much else, into what the WELL cofounder Stewart Brand was the first to refer to as a looming “digital dark age,” when cultural history that is maintained only at will by for-profit corporations erodes and falls away, leaving huge gaps in future generations’ understandings of who we were.31 But I like to think that someone else will make a copy of the shrine to Harry Styles’s vomit. We’ll never know an internet without it—thank god! On my phone, sometimes, I replay the clip of Harry Styles laughing at the puke poster. I ripped it from YouTube and saved it to my camera roll so I wouldn’t ever lose it. “A little niche, maybe,” he says over and over, while the studio audience laughs.
Gabrielle Kopera’s original photo of the shrine is easy enough to find, indexed dozens of times on Google Images. It’s referenced in articles about “the moment Harry Styles knew he’d made it,” which was supposedly the moment someone told him his vomit had been scooped off the ground and was up for sale on eBay.32 In grainy, bootleg YouTube clips, it’s pulled up on the big screen in the background of The Graham Norton Show, while Styles says, “Is this the puke thing?” The puke thing! In Tumblr’s degrading and incoherent archives, it can be much harder to walk back in time to find the original conversations about this vomit, but they are there so long as you know that they are there. “My stupidity was immortalized,” Kopera said when I asked her how she felt about her shrine’s brush with online fame.33 She’d known where to place the sign because she’d grown up five minutes away from the spot and recognized it instantly in the background of the photos—she’d been driving past it her whole life. The sign was only up for half an hour before other fans started tweeting at her, saying they were going to drive out to Los Angeles to burn or destroy it. (They felt she was encouraging the ruthless stalking of Styles by tabloid photographers.)
So she went back for it, grabbed it, and stowed it in the garage. (It’s still there.) She was eighteen then, and the type of One Direction fan who would sometimes wait at the arrivals gate at LAX to catch a glimpse of the band. At the time, Kopera was bored: she didn’t have the money for a four-year school and so she’d stayed home to work and to study at a local community college while most of her friends moved away. Being a fan of One Direction made her feel like she had something to do that wasn’t a chore. At the very least, she would have something to say and people to say it to—something to care about and a way to spend her time. When she saw the photos of Styles throwing up, she saw them as a prank the universe had played on her alone. Here she was, one of his biggest fans in the world, a girl who had traveled for him and tweeted for him and thought about him for years, and he had barfed right in the middle of the drudgery of her life.
She was surprised that people misinterpreted the shrine so dramatically by assuming that she was crazy or malicious. She was also confused by the way it was covered in the media, as if it was something more bizarre than a comedy routine she was performing, primarily with herself as the audience. “The worst part for me about the sign was that news outlets kept saying his throw-up was being sold on eBay,” Kopera said. Some of them strongly implied that she was the one who had scooped it up. “I never saw puke, nor did I want to. I definitely never, ever tried to sell his throw-up. I never actually saw a listing on eBay, so I feel like that was made up.” Oh well. You can’t control the rumors and myths that swirl around the legitimate events of history. All you can do is preserve what you have. She keeps the photo on her Instagram account, and promised she would forever.
“It was more a joke about my life than his,” she told me. Now it’s a joke about mine, too.