Fandom & Capitalism

I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.

Comfort, however, is not the same as healing. The frequently-invoked (pop) culture war framework conjures images of a pitched battle between ‘queer fandom’ interested in social justice and a reactionary fan identity over the soul of the culture industry. In reality what drives our culture industry is not a soul, but two basic functions of its place... See more

A democratic cultural politics would be developmentalist — oriented to learning, growth and discovery — rather than presentist. All kinds of resources made available by digital hyperconnectivity could support such a developmentalist cultural politics. But the algorithms that feed us what we like or register what is popular — and thereby... See more