I Would Very Much Like To Be Excluded From This Lore

the ‘collaborative play’ (as Default Friend phrases it in the above tweet) aspect of TikTok really becomes apparent.

Taylor Swift, for example, is notorious for generating lore, putting easter eggs in everything she does, and readingand playing into fan theories about herself. She does this both in the ‘text’ of her songs (see: the fandom’s obsession around the Betty/August/James lore in the album /iterallycalled folklore), as well as in her activities surroundin... See more

‘lore’—it’s a model of knowledge that is able to interface with both reality and fiction.

The way that we engage with media on the internet has become laden with fandom energy. All narratives on the internet have become subsumed under the umbrella of‘content’, no matter their scale or veracity. They all have the potential to gather lore, because they can all be read the same way—like fictional media franchises. Thisincludes everyday soc... See more

Truth is only important relative to the lore object, whether that be fictional media, or the real life of an internet micro-celebrity.

Over the past 13 years, Swift has perfected the pop culture feedback loop: Sheshares updates about her life and drops hints about new music, which fans thengobble up and re-promote with their own theories, which Swift then re-shares on herTumblr or incorporates into future clues. [...] "I've trained them to be that way," shesays of her fans' astute... See more

If you try to make your online presence more lore-worthy in order to be legible to these platforms, you could end up falling asleep at thewheel of the algorithm. You might even wake up one morning to find that the fancamyou liked to imagine watching you has suddenly become real.