The fact the Russian coup didn’t even last a full day and no one got arrested sounds suspicious to you? Easy. But now, if you don’t like what’s in the newspaper you can just write your own thing and get more readers than it did.Ĭan’t possibly comprehend that extreme levels of wealth created an environment of arrogance that led to a submarine vaporizing a bunch of guys in the middle of the ocean? Just tweet that that’s not actually what happened. Here are two great threads comparing funny mean-spirited reactions to the Titanic sinking to the similar memes everyone made this month about the imploded submarine billionaires. I don’t think the way people react to news stories in 2023 is all that different from how it’s ever been. And now, even though they don’t think of themselves as a competing news fandoms, they absolutely are. And over the last decade, as platforms flattened everything into content, most news publishers, hiding behind antiquated ideas about objectivity and made desperate from vanishing ad revenue, allowed themselves to be flattened, as well. And in a world run by big platforms, a person’s post becomes discourse, discourse creates memes, memes inspire a fandom, and fandoms become social movements.
Inside an online platform everything, even reality, is just content and content just begets more content. Here’s a really good recent example of what I’m talking about: If you took a post about casting rumors from a Marvel subreddit or tweets from Taylor Swift stan’s thread and switched out all the proper nouns, you’d end up with a pretty standard conversation happening in a right-wing Facebook Group.
QAnon, Johnny Depp supporters, antivaxxers - if you lift up the rock and actually read what these people are posting, for the most part, it’s just random news stories or deranged chatter about news stories that they then fit into their fan fiction. And are all fandoms about the same thing: the news. These communities, obviously, have political dimensions to them, but I think they are, first and foremost, fandoms. Kennedy is also a perfect example of what I believe was one of the biggest mistakes of the 2010s, which was to treat conspiracy theories as political movements and conspiracy theorists as those movements’ leaders. Nothing junior about those pecs, baby! Just don’t ask them how they feel about children getting the measles.
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