As journalist Amanda Hess writes in the New York Times, “Shopping, decorating, grooming and sculpting are now jumping with meaning. And a purchase need not have any explicit social byproduct—the materials eco-friendly, or the proceeds donated to charity—to be weighted with significance.

Kek wasn’t “real” in the sense that nobody believed he was metaphysically out there, offline. But he was real in the sense that he served as a celebration of the randomness of online culture, which relished in the chaos that Trump seemed poised to bring to America. That chaos, they knew deep down, reflected the structure of the world all along.

They prioritize intuitional spirituality over institutional religion. And they want, when available institutional options fail to suit their needs, the freedom to mix and match, to create their own daily rituals and practices and belief systems.

Harry Potter, in other words, isn’t just a story we enjoy reading. Rather, it’s had a measurable impact on a whole generation’s moral universe. In an age when fewer and fewer people read the Bible, the media properties of fan culture are the closest thing the Remixed have to sacred texts.

Consumer-capitalist culture offers us not merely necessities but identities. Meaning, purpose, community, and ritual can all—separately or together—be purchased on Amazon Prime.

One fan created his own special coin to “tip” the bellhop who escorts guests from the bar into the show proper. Another developed his own costumed character—a lumberjack named Clyde—and took to haunting the McKittrick’s (non-ticketed) rooftop garden bar while studying for his university exams, delighting in the fact that most people never quite

Today’s Remixed reject authority, institution, creed, and moral universalism. They value intuition, personal feeling, and experiences.

Much of the responsibility for that shift belongs to institutions themselves. Traditional religions, traditional political hierarchies, and traditional understandings of society have been unwilling or unable to offer compellingly meaningful accounts of the world, provide their members with purpose, foster sustainable communities, or put forth

In his 1911 book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim argues that religion is basically the glue that keeps a society together: a set of rituals and beliefs that people affirm in order to strengthen their identity as a group. Religion, he writes, is a “unified system of beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community