By Niko Stratis

This week’s newsletter is a guest post from the brilliant culture writer Niko Stratis. Niko is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in outlets like SPIN, Bitch, Xtra, Catapult and more. Her work primarily focuses on culture, the 1990s, queer/trans topics and as often as possible where all those ideas intersect. She wrote that piece about Jackass that you liked and also the Gin Blossoms one. She is also the creator and host of V/A Club, a podcast about movie soundtracks, and Anxiety Shark, a newsletter that uses music to explore her relationship to themes like gender and sobriety.

There are artists whose names are full and rich and vibrant where they shine on marquees, but become reduced to asterisks and code words on the internet—Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Phoebe Bridgers, the One Direction industrial complex. Pop stars that have risen to heights unimaginable by their peers, elevated to statuses shared by deities and demigods. Pop stars with wide appeal and dynamic brand demographics that share little in common stylistically or musically but have one common thread tying them together: the worst fans you could possibly imagine. 

This is nothing new. It’s a well known fact among culture critics that if you write anything at all about Taylor Swift, you have to prepare for the possibility of being doxxed. Journalists have been threatened, intimidated, harassed and more in the name of the one true Taylor, their DMs and inboxes full of unedited rants that trade in casual slurs. I know this because I have also written about Taylor Swift, once, in the Globe and Mail in what I believe was a pretty fair review. In short order, my inbox filled with Swifties furious that I, a self-professed Swift agnostic, would be granted the opportunity to bathe in her light and in no time I was only able to scan my inbox for subject lines in all caps that screamed WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE and I HOPE IT WAS WORTH IT and pictures of what they assumed my address was. But it doesn’t really matter what you say, it only matters that you deign to say anything short of unilateral praise. Swifties descend upon journalists like locusts and swarm until the bones have been picked away. 

All because we kind of like her but have some notes. 

Stan culture existed before Twitter, but the platform was instrumental to its growth

It wasn’t always like this; once, a fanbase could have a cute nickname that wasn’t also a crimson flag. We are grappling right now with the imminent demise of the town square of the internet with Twitter and as a result, people are wondering and worrying where we might go. Bluesky, Threads, Spill or Mastodon, or maybe we will simply walk into the ocean and never return. But the era of a centralized internet feels like it might be over. This means the loss of space for marginalized groups who have used outlets like Twitter to connect, build community, share resources and feel connected to a world beyond their door. But maybe there is something good hidden away in this too. 

When I was young, in the 1990s, the internet was a thing you called into creation through a modem tethered to the wall and an open phone line. The first social interaction I had on the internet was a local BBS (Bulletin Board System), where people talked about the music they liked and a movie they saw last weekend and their friend who is flirting with the grossest guy in class. There was a thrill in all of this, communication without borders that could turn heated just as easily as it built community. It wasn’t long before the internet became prevalent and widely used, and the heat of online discourse was left on and unchecked. 

As the internet became more prevalent, as people discovered Napster and the idea of the MP3, they also developed a newfound hatred for Lars Ulrich, the drummer from Metallica. In 2000, the band attempted to prevent hundreds of thousands of fans from freely sharing their music on Napster—most notably the work-in-progress “I Disappear” from the forthcoming Mission Impossible II soundtrack—alleging copyright infringement. Ulrich, the face of the pushback, became a caricature during the ensuing legal battles and appeals to congress, perceived as greedy and malevolent. In retrospect, he was trying to regain some agency over when and where his music was made available and asking that his creative work hold some value instead of being turned into a free commodity for the nameless faceless of the internet. But that’s not how people saw it at the time, at least partially because of online chatter. This was the first time I recall the internet forming an opinion together, although I’m certain it must have happened before, please, don’t @ me. 

Fandoms grew online as the internet shifted away from niche power users and into a common ground. Napster was many things, but it was ultimately a door opening to an internet that could be used by anyone, that connected people together and formed a world they could belong in together despite geographical limitations. 

Napster became Limewire and Soulseek, we used AIM and MSN and ICQ and then MySpace, Tumblr and Livejournal. People made pages dedicated to their favourite artists on Geocities and Angelfire and then Blogspot dot com. The conspiracy theory that Avril Lavigne died and was replaced with a body double was created in this space, on a Brazilian blog titled Avril Esta Morta.  

And then came Twitter. The promise of this platform was the idea of a public square, where good ideas (and snappy one-liners) could spread quickly, accumulating influence, community and even power for the tweeter, not to mention actual offline change sometimes. To be fair, the platform has given us many things, but stan culture—named after the Eminem song wherein a fan was so obsessed with the rapper that he tried to emulate him and then, feeling spurned, killed his girlfriend and himself—is a toxic byproduct of the eternal connectivity it encouraged. Twitter grants the veneer of proximity to your favourite artists. Everyone is an @ or a DM away, they post on the same platform, they speak the same online language and as a result, it’s all too easy to believe that they’re speaking right to you. This creates a parasocial hunting ground for fans, Swifties stalking through search bars for her name, ready to pounce and protect someone who has never demanded their service. 

It’s not just Taylor; she is only a marquee name in the toxic fandom conversation. Phoebe Bridgers has a similar army willing to shed blood in her name, as does Grande, One Direction (as a group and individually), Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé. And while these fans might have initially become fans because of the music, it’s not actually about the artists, in a lot of ways. It’s about what the artist says about the individual, and how the line has been blurred so thoroughly that an artist ceases to be real and transforms into a perfect indelible idea, one that needs to be protected at all costs. 

Maybe Post-Twitter fandom will be slightly less toxic

There’s a line in the Sloan song, “Coax Me,” where Chris Murphy sings “it’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans.” The song is a conversation around punk rock and being on a major label vs. doing something for yourself, and while we are far afield between Sloan and Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers, we are perhaps not. 

Artists like Bridgers and Swift don’t really get to choose their audience. They are the figurehead of a larger machine that runs on rabid fans, escalating ticket prices and limited-edition merchandise. An industry that thrives on the idea of the artist over the reality of their lives.

And those rabid fans aren’t always kind to their favourites, anyway. In the recent press tour for the debut full-length Boygenius record, Bridgers has openly discussed how this makes her feel through stark statements like “I, at one of the lowest points of my life, saw people who claim to love me fucking dehumanize me and shame me and fucking bully me on the way to my dad's wake.”

Artists have tried to push back on their fans. Ariana Grande has had to ask her fans to stop body shaming. Bridgers has repeatedly talked about how othered her fans have made her feel. Taylor Swift is an outlier as someone who garners a lot of press and attention about her connection with her fans, but is conspicuously silent about the fact that every journalist is terrified to say anything short of praise in her name.

In the confines of a centralized internet, sites like Twitter help keep these flames alive. If one Swiftie is name-searching and piling on journalists, it’s easy for others to smell blood and join in. It is a website that thrives on discourse and stoked fires, and who among us hasn’t lost our heads a bit in a pile-on? Everyone is here, everyone is doing it together as one and we are fighting for something and someone bigger than ourselves. 

Maybe whatever we do next, splintered off into smaller social media sites that aren’t trying to be everything to everyone and instead cater to targeted interests and communities, will dislodge this desire to make everyone love the celebrity we’ve chosen to elevate above the rest. I want this for us, because I want to be able to write about Taylor Swift without worrying about who will knock on my door next.  

Find Niko on Twitter and Instagram, and sign up for her newsletter!

Announcing: Hot Doc’s Thirst Talks, The Pedro Pascal Edition

I truly could not be more excited for this!!!! Later this month, I’ll be talking about why Pedro Pascal is super hot (and also what his popularity says about female desire, the state of the world and even the experience of being a woman in the year 2023) with three of my favourites—Katherine Singh, Sadaf Ahsan and Meaghan Wray—at a really fun Hot Docs panel. Come through!

The details:

When: July 25 at 7pm
Where: Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema, 506 Bloor St. W., Toronto
How Much: $15 (But Friday Things readers can get 50% off the ticket price with the code HD062350.)

Get your tickets now!

And Did You Hear About…

Mattel’s intense moviemaking strategy. (Barbie is definitely just the beginning.)

Darkest Hue’s excellent analysis of the “house-husband complex,” and how it can explain why Keke Palmer’s stay-at-home boyfriend tried to shame her for wearing a revealing outfit earlier this week.

Jezebel’s recent longread on the state of ballet, which is in the midst of a long overdue cultural reckoning.

Author Tre’vell Anderson’s excellent Teen Vogue essay about why trans liberation requires so much more than visibility.

This person who I think might be living my dream life?

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