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

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.

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.

The little indignities of being young and the big disappointments of not finding the love you want or of not becoming the person you’d hoped—these things are tempered by fandom, which is such an ugly, boring word. Fandom is an interruption; it’s as simple as enjoying something for no reason, and it’s as complicated as growing up. It should be

many of them had also remembered a feeling of identification: they wanted to be, like the Beatles, free. They’d wanted to go on adventures and provoke feelings—“the louder you screamed, the less likely anyone would forget the power of fans,” Ehrenreich summarized.

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!

it’s hard to celebrate the victories of fangirls the way I’d like to, because those victories are also being celebrated by the sort of people who will use them to make more money off of us.

they were in awe of its concision and hilarity, the way it felt like something that had happened to them personally. It had all happened to us, personally, and it was still happening.

“What if ideological distinctions still mattered and were not so easily swept away by a levelling torrent of information and capital?” Fry asked. “What if anything still meant something?”2