En av de få Substack jeg betaler for er Garbage Day fordi Ryan Broderick er flink til å ha oversikt hva som skjer i sosiale medier og dekker alt fra morsomme memes til politikk.

Den 31. august hadde han et utgave som delvis handlet om «Our Frustrating Fandom Future»

Og der fant jeg særlig følgende avsnitt interessant:

It’s a fascinating moment to be in because it largely means that no one’s in charge of pop culture anymore. The studios and artists that make cultural products can’t control how they’re shaped by hundreds of thousands of often-anonymous internet users and, when these spaces are engulfed in drama and in-fighting it’s not like the original creators can come back in and fix things. It’s made everything feel bizarrely Catholic, turning us all into neurotic little monks endlessly debating about what is and isn’t canon, hoping to be rewarded by some incomprehensibly vast system of hierarchies, algorithms, and influencers that have all completely lost control themselves.

Og følgende kommentar Ryan hadde kommet over på Reddit:

You know what sucks? What really sucks? [The Last Jedi] came out at just the right time, in just the right little nexus of events, that it is more or less inextricably tied to the indoctrination/grift phenomena that set the entire internet on its side for about 6-8 months straight - granted, it’s STILL here, but for about 6-8 months there, it became basically EVERYTHING there was online. And as a result, there is almost no other context by which the film can be placed or discussed. Even this EMPIRE piece doesn’t know how to do it, because basically nobody does.

It just sucks that the film is irrevocably tainted by the concerted effort to frame it as a proxy for whatever real-world fights everyone WANTED to have but was too insecure to wade into in good faith. Insecure assholes WANTED to join “the culture war,” but were too chickenshit to have any skin in the game, and so they made Star Wars the battleground instead, because it’s easier and safer to warp perspective to fit all that shit onto it than it is to deal with the world outside (also easier to get Patreon donations).

Den omtalte artikkelen fra Empire er her.