How online fandom shaped our world

The writer, known online as Etymology Nerd, is the author of ‘Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language’

The cultural mainstream can only focus on a few dozen pop stars at any given time. For the devoted fans of those who are cast aside, there is little choice but to gather on “Stan Twitter”, a corner of the internet dedicated to obsessive celebrity fandom. Here, people track and promote their favourites in a bid to bring them back to the public’s attention.

Just as the horror writer HP Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ universe imagined a pantheon of deities, forgotten except by the scattered occultists trying to summon them, the digital devotees of this modern online subculture attempt to reshape reality through an almost religious dedication to their chosen artist.

By labouring over new video edits of the celebrity or engaging in internet discussions, a stan (the internet’s term for an extremely enthusiastic fan, named after the protagonist of an Eminem song) can slowly summon their favourites back into the limelight, synchronising social and algorithmic momentum to deliberately move the window of relevance. If they succeed, they lift their target out of what some jokingly call “Khia Asylum” — an imaginary holding cell named after the one-hit-wonder rapper Khia, who disappeared from mainstream relevance 20 years ago.

I see a very similar dynamic play out in internet meme communities. The digital references that reach the mainstream, like “skibidi” or “6-7,” are not accidents. They start with a hyper-online group of post-ironic practitioners. By allocating their time to specific memes, these groups — which constantly rematerialise under new names like “juggtok” and “niche community” and have no motive other than the desire to influence others — are able to alter the vocabularies of teenagers around the world.

Once the memes become widespread, the community moves on.

The line between social media follower and disciple is particularly blurred in the world of K-Pop, where fans of South Korean girl and boy bands try to boost algorithmic attention for their favourite groups, helping the unlucky ones escape nugudom, a kind of nowhere land derived from the Korean word for “who?” Through their likes and comments, fans have been able to nudge bands like BTS from comparative obscurity to global phenomenon. Each digital engagement doubles as a signal to the algorithm, making the trend ever more real.

Long before the rise of K-pop and TikTok, this behaviour was presaged by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, an academic collective at Warwick University in the late 1990s. By fusing the ideas of Lovecraft and other sci-fi writers with those of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the CCRU argued that any idea could be circulated into cultural discourse through hyperstition — a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where fictional statements become true through repetition.

The idea is that, since reality is socially constructed, if enough people say “this celebrity is popular” or “this meme is popular”, those celebrities and memes will indeed become popular. All that is required is the time and energy to promote the ideas and people will eventually catch on.

The CCRU was particularly interested in pop culture as a hyperstitioned phenomenon but they also applied their concepts to capitalism and technology.

The idea that anyone can shift the “Overton window” of acceptable discourse in a particular direction by presenting a version of reality online has not been lost on the American alt-right, which has referenced the writings of Nick Land, a former CCRU researcher.

Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy — an anti-democratic, reactionary ideology that calls for society to return to traditional constructs — has informed the political views of technology investors including Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, helping to shape the current culture in Silicon Valley and the White House in turn. If enough people believe that governments should be run by techno-capitalist enterprises or that society is working towards a singularity with AI, those concepts become real. And while this subject matter is undoubtedly weightier than pop music, the same logic applies of slowly “summoning” an idea into the mainstream.

K-Pop fans, meme pages, political theorists and occultists devote themselves to creating the world they would like to see. This begins with an understanding of how ideas now spread. Our music, language, aesthetics and politics all emerge from amorphous pockets of algorithmic space — and they can all be manipulated.